When I think of animals, I think about birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, spiders, and more—but there’s one animal I haven’t gotten to yet: the boneyard animal kingdom.
A boneyard is a place where bones are stored for future use. Most people think of boneyards as being places where bones are stored for use in the future to be used by human beings, but they go much farther back. The oldest known boneyard was found 5,500 years ago in the Netherlands. It was there that the Neanderthals stored their bony prey, such as horses and rhinos.
Yes, this is a bone we all know and love. But the most interesting place in the boneyard are the boneyard bones, which are a rare form of fossilized animal. They date back 10,000 years and have been found in many places in the world. They can be found in the fossil record of every continent from Siberia to North America. They are the only form of animal fossil found in the world.
Fossils have been found in every continent except Antarctica, which has some very big gaps. And they’re not all from the same time period. In fact, they’re so different that some scientists think there might actually be more than one species of bony animal living at the same time.
Sure, a boneyard might not be the first thing you think of when you think of “animals.” You might think of a pile of dead animals, a graveyard, or maybe the remains of some poor animal being buried alive. But in a lot of cases, there are hundreds if not thousands of different species of animal that can be found in a single area. These animals are called “bony arthropods,” or BAs.
BAs are mostly insects, although some of them are definitely arachnids, and they are extremely diverse. For instance, the Arthropod Dung Beetle feeds on animal dung. The Ant Dung Beetle feeds on small ants. The Spiny Ant Dung Beetle feeds on ants and spiders. The Spiny Ant Dung Beetle is an insect found in India. The Ant Dung Beetle is a beetle. The Ant Dung Beetle is an insect found in Mexico.
Like most arthropods, bony arthropods are pretty weird and disgusting looking. They eat what they need and they are basically just big bug things. Just because they are big bugs doesn’t mean they are particularly smart. And that’s what makes them so awesome. Of course, insects are also awesome because they can eat just about everything. So this makes them a perfect diet for us.
And so we end up with a whole bunch of giant bug things living in a boneyard. I mean, we call them bugs but the boneyard is a real insect paradise. They have lots of different kinds of bugs with lots of different names. This makes them just the coolest and also pretty easy to identify. They are the arthropods that eat insects.
Of course, insects are great for us because they have lots of different kinds of different smells. So when we get bugs we can eat them in the kitchen and we can put them in the fridge and we can eat them raw. They even make good meat. And what’s even better? When we eat them raw they are basically dead but when we put them in a salad they are alive and they can actually talk to us.