The underground homes, often a
century old, are topped with gardens exploding with lush dune
grass, diamondleaf willows, and yellow wildflowers—a flash of color in
an otherwise gray landscape.
“They’re bright green and everything around them is just brown,” says Brian Person, a wildlife biologist for the North Slope Borough in Barrow, Alaska. “It pops”…
i used to like leopard seals but then i found out they just replaced their incisors w/more canine teeth & also their other teeth are more canine teeth. also their skull is the size of a horse so fuck them honestly
Rachel Carson was born on this day in 1907. Though best remembered today for her 1962 work Silent Spring, which alerted the world to the dangers posed by DDT in particular and more generally by the incautious use of chemicals in the ecosystem, Carson was already well known to the American public for her best selling books popularizing the flood of new oceanographic research coming to light in the years after World War II. The Linda Lear Center has an extensive research archive on Rachel Carson, including a large number of photographs covering every aspect of her career.
DO YOU WANT TO STARE AT PICTURES OF CONDORS EATING DEAD STUFF AND IDENTIFY THE CONDORS, DEAD STUFF, AND OTHER THINGS EATING THE DEAD STUFF, ALL IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE? I DO, AND I BET YOU DO TOO!!! Help these nice researchers out with their birbs by clicking on birbs in pictures.
Guys, this is not a drill. Antarctic scientists need you to study photos of penguins to help them figure out how climate change is affecting these stumpy little flightless birds.
Scientists from the UK have installed a series of 75 cameras near penguin territories in Antarctica and its surrounding islands to figure out what’s happening with local populations. But with each of those cameras taking hourly photos, they simply can’t get through all the adorable images without your help.
“We can’t do this work on our own,” lead researcher Tom Hart from the University of Oxford told the BBC, “and every penguin that people click on and count on the website – that’s all information that tells us what’s happening at each nest, and what’s happening over time.”
The citizen science project is pretty simple – known as PenguinWatch 2.0,all you need to do is log on, look at photos, and identify adult penguins, chicks, and eggs in each image. Each photo requires just a few clicks to identify, and you can chat about your results in the website’s ‘Discuss’ page with other volunteers.
This close up of whale skin shows a community of living creatures. Gray
Whales have two common hitchhikers on their bodies: barnacles and whale
LICE.
But whale lice aren’t lice at all; they’re a type of
amphipod crustacean called cyamids. And each species of cyamid is unique to a
species of whale! To survive, cyamids hitch a ride on a whale and munch
bits of its skin and flesh. If the whale is healthy these parasites
don’t harm it – a commensal relationship. If a whale is covered in them
it is often an indication of illness or injury.
Since it’s April Fool’s Day, and Tumblr is sending images of lizards screaming across all our dashboards at hyper-light speeds, I thought it would be a good time to talk about a lizard who April Fooled the entire paleontological community, long before the Mop/Wretched Tooth divide threatened to send our sociopolitical infrastructure crumbling to the ground.
Is it a tenuous connection? Yeah, but I was gonna make this post anyway, so live with it!
Longisquama lived during the Triassic Period, 235 million years ago, in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. It might have been a lizard, as I asserted above, but its place within Reptilia is actually quite uncertain; the only thing known for certain is that Longisquama is a “diapsid reptile”, meaning it could be a squamate, a rhynchocephalian, a crocodilian, or a pre-dinosaur.
Longisquama is distinguished by the row of strange appendanges growing from its back. The purpose of these appendages is uncertain, and has long been the subject of much paleontological debate.
The most iconic version of Longisquama depicts it with twin rows of appendages, rather than the single row preserved in the only known fossil specimen, and shows it using these twin wing-like structures to glide. While this is almost certainly not the case, numerous supposedly serious paleontologists – including Dougal Dixon, speculative evolution writer and long-time peddler of insane made-up garbage – have espoused the theory that Longisquama is the true ancestor of birds.
This makes absolutely zero sense from an anatomical perspective, and was essentially nothing more than a very convenient way for a bunch of die-hard dinosaur traditionalists to deny that birds were the descendants of dinosaurs. Even so, this debate raged on until the shockingly recent year of 2006.
At that time, new studies of the single Longisquama fossil found that the appendages weren’t part of the animal’s body at all.
Me, at an art store: I need a paint marker with low toxicity and a delicate tip.
Employee: What kind of project are you working on?
Me: It’s for a research project. I just need bright colors.
Employee: What medium are you using? Canvas or paper?
Me: uh….spiders.
Employee: Plastic or felt?
Me: ….live spiders. Like, from the forest.
Employee: ….
Employee: I have to get back to the counter.
A Pretty Taste for Paradox 