During his time in the French Navy Denard fought in Indochina and in Algeria, and spent some time in jail. He subsequently served as a policeman in French Morocco. Afterwards he became a mercenary and fought in African countries like Congo, Angola, Rhodesia, Gabon and especially in the Comoros.
He converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism, from Judaism to Islam, and from Islam to Roman Catholicism.
He was married seven times and was the father of eight children. He practiced polygamy after his conversion to Islam.
Denard had Alzheimer's disease at the time of his death.
Eutheria
Eutheria is the taxonomical name for the main group of living mammals.
This taxon contains the placental mammals, of which humans are one species.
Eutheria was introduced by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1880. Members of Eutheria are now found on all continents and in all oceans.
The terms 'Eutheria and 'Placental' do not mean quite the same thing. A few early eutherians in the Lower Cretaceous were not placentals. "Eomaia" is the earliest example.
All living Eutherians are placental mammals. This means that a Eutherian fetus is fed during gestation by a placenta. The offspring of Eutherians are carried in the mother's uterus until fully developed.
Eutherians are different from other mammal groups such as monotremes and marsupials which (like the earliest eutherians) are not placental.
Monotremes, for example, lay eggs which protect the young until they are fully developed. Marsupials give birth to young who are not completely developed. Their young then move to a special pouch in the mother's body to continue their development.
The earliest known eutherian species is the extinct "Eomaia scansoria" from the Lower Cretaceous in China.
Tito Beltrán
Tito Ernesto Beltrán (born on July 1 1965) is a Swedish-Chilean tenor. Tito Beltrán was born in Punta Arenas, Chile. Beltrán left Chile in 1986 to study in Sweden where he now lives. He has performed at many opera houses around the world. He also performs at different scenes and tv-shows in Sweden. Since February 2007 he has been performing at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm. This is where he sings in the operas "La Traviata" and "Tosca".
In October 2008, Beltrán was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for rape and sexual abuse. He got conditional liberty on February 2010.
Cetartiodactyla
Cetartiodactyla is the taxonomical superorder which includes whales (and dolphins) and even-toed ungulates. The name was created by merging the name for the two orders, Cetacea and Artiodactyla, into a single word.
Cetartiodactyla is used because it is thought that whales evolved from the artiodactyls. Because of this, their closest living land relative may be the hippopotamus.
Leonardo
Leonardo is a male given name. Many people have this name. The name is Germanic in origin. It means "Strong as a lion."
People with the name Leonardo include:
Tetrapod
Tetrapods (Greek "tetrapoda" = four feet) are vertebrate tetrapodomorph land animals. The basic tetrapod plan is four legs and feet. This kind of locomotion is quadrupedal. Amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, and mammals are all tetrapods. Even though snakes do not have limbs, they are tetrapods because they evolved from animals with four limbs.
The earliest tetrapods evolved from the Sarcopterygii, or lobe-finned fish, into air-breathing amphibians, perhaps in the Upper Devonian period. This means the transition took place in fish, before the land was the main habitat. This is typical of transitional fossils undergoing mosaic evolution.
Clear fossil tetrapod tracks from the mid-Devonian predate previous tetrapod records by 18 million years. These tracks are from the Middle Devonian of Poland, dated to nearly 400 million years ago. The footprints were made in the mud of a tropical lagoon, and no animal of that time could have made the tracks except a tetrapod. The find strongly suggests that the animals were fish, not amphibia, when the transition to limbs occurred. The term fishapod is becoming used. They would have been derived from lobe-finned fish (Sarcopterygii), but of a genus whose body fossil has not yet been found. The Polish team suggest the fish > tetrapod transition might have taken place as early as the Lower Devonian.
The earliest tetrapods lived entirely in water. They could not live on land. Earlier, it was believed that fish had first moved onto land – either looking for food (like modern mudskippers) or to find water when the pond they lived in dried out. It was believed that they later evolved legs, lungs, and other body parts to live better on land.
Nine genera of Devonian tetrapods have been described. These earliest tetrapods were not terrestrial. They lived in swampy habitats like shallow wetlands, coastal lagoons, brackish river deltas, and even shallow marine sediments. There is much to suggest that these are the kind of environments in which the tetrapods evolved. Also, because fossils of early tetrapods are found widely in the Old Red Sandstone continent, they must have spread by following the coastal lines. This means they could not have lived only in freshwater.
Still, they may have spent brief periods out of water and would have used their legs to paw their way through the mud. The earliest confirmed terrestrial forms are known from the early Carboniferous deposits, some 20 million years later.
Tetrapods adapted to terrestrial environments over time and spent longer periods away from the water. They also spent more of their juvenile stage on land before returning to the water for the rest of their life. It is also possible that the adults started to spend some time on land to bask in the sun, close to the water's edge. The first true tetrapods that were adapted to moving on land were small. Only later did they increase in size.
Between the lobe-finned fish tetrapods and the first amphibia and amniotes in the Middle Carboniferous lies a gap of 30 million years, with few satisfactory tetrapod fossils. This, noted in the early 1950s by Alfred Romer, is Romer's gap. Some new fossils were found in the 1990s, such as "Pederpes", right in the middle of the Romer Gap. The gap still hides details of the transition from fish to tetrapod, but not so much as before.
So far, only two fossil sites from the Tournasian (earliest Carboniferous) are known. One is Horton Bluff Formation at Blue Beach, Nova Scotia. Much of this material has not yet been scientifically described.
The only other place a Tournasian tetrapod was found is near Dumbarton in the West of Scotland. The articulated (connected) skeleton of "Pederpes" was found there. Now comes news of new finds from this formation in five places in the Scottish Borders. The paper describes five new Tournaisian tetrapods, with information about their habitat.
The authors say
Apparently, the split between the amphibians and the amniotes came soon after the extinction event as the tetrapods began to recover. "This accords with most molecular dates for the split, which place it at an average of 355  my ago, a date only 4 myr after the end-Devonian".
Whereas amphibia lay their eggs in water, all other tetrapods (the amniotes) lay cleidoic eggs. These eggs are like private little ponds, protecting and nourishing the embryo until it grows into a hatchling. This was a key evolutionary 'invention', which allowed the amniotes to invade the land. Once the amniotes were truly land animals, there followed a huge adaptive radiation. This was one of the most significant advances in vertebrate evolution.
Stem tetrapods are difficult to classify because they lack some or all of the key characteristics of the standard groups.