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Text A
Colourful cave art
On 12 September, 1940, some teenagers made an amazing discovery near their
home in rural France. Eighteen-year-old Marcel Ravidat and three friends
discovered a deep hole, and decided to explore. They were led into a cavern,
now known as Lascaux Cave. The young men were stunned to find its walls
covered in colourful prehistoric paintings. This artwork showed more than 2000 5
different figures, mostly animals such as horses and bulls. There was even a
rhinoceros! Later, the boys returned to the cave with their teacher and the head
of a nearby museum. Soon after that, official investigations began, which
concluded that the paintings were 15–20 000 years old. In 1948, the cave was
opened to the public. 10
The paintings mostly featured black charcoal and yellow and red ochre. Yellow
ochre is made from a common clay containing iron oxide. Prehistoric people
ground the clay down into powder and mixed it with plant sap or water to make
paint. The artists then dabbed the paint onto rock using leaves, tree bark, thin
animal bones or just their hands. At Lascaux, some of the artwork was spray- 15
painted onto the rock walls by blowing paint through a hollow bone or reed.
Unlike some other colours, yellow ochre does not fade as long as it is not
exposed to sunlight. But, by 1955, about 1200 people were visiting the cave
every day, and the heat from their bodies caused humidity, which was damaging
the paintings. Consequently, in 1963, Lascaux Cave was shut to visitors. The 20
paintings were restored, air conditioning was installed, and the cave was
reopened. However, in 2000, another problem appeared: mould started to grow
on the paintings. Since then, the cave has been sprayed every two weeks with a
suitable chemical and the walls are carefully cleaned by hand.
Today, the original cave is no longer accessible to the public, but since 1983 25
copies of several paintings have been displayed in another cave nearby. These
copies were made with materials which are believed to be the same as the ones
used all those years ago.
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Text B
Now you see me, now you don’t: how animals use colour
Camouflage – the use of colour to blend into the background – enables animals
to stay hidden when they most need to: while hunting, or being hunted.
Light and shade
Many fish have a dark upper surface and a pale underside. This is called
countershading and means the fish are hard to see from either above or below.
Some species can give off light from their abdomen (underbelly) that is the same 5
shade of blue as the sky overhead, making them almost invisible to predators
looking up at them.
Blending in
Most camouflage works best against a similar background. For instance, irregular
spots of fish on the soft, sandy sea-bottom or green colouring of insects living in
grass. However, some rather surprising patterns also work well, simply by 10
breaking up the outline of an animal’s body. An example of this is the dark stripes
on the bold orange colouring of a tiger. And it’s not only animals that are
camouflaged: the eggs of many ground-nesting birds are often mottled or
streaked so they blend in with their surroundings.
All change
Many animals can change their camouflage. Some change according to the 15
season. For example, Arctic foxes grow a coat of winter white. Others change
much faster: many frogs can darken or lighten their skin in a matter of seconds to
match a range of different backgrounds.
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