From the monthly archives:

December 2009

The Sublime Dance of the Weedy Sea Dragon

December 26, 2009

Snowed in and still wired  . . . so I’d like to close the year with something beautiful for you to contemplate. BBC keeps releasing short clips of “Life” on YouTube, and here is another (Dang you BBC! When will you release this in full in the states? When? When?!). Hit the resize button second-to-right [...]

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Give the Gift of Slime

December 24, 2009

If you’re a reader of this blog, you’re probably like me: you love life on Earth. If you’re still struggling for a gift for someone and know they feel the same, consider a donation in their name to a conservation organization. The Nature Conservancy or the relatively new charity Oceana are two large conservation organizations [...]

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The van Leeuwenhoek is in the Gallery Just Down the Hall . . .

December 23, 2009

When it has a Water Flea Circus, a Rotifer Room, and a Radiolaria Lounge you know this blogger is going to love it, and the Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Art Forms is home to all these things. The website, proudly presented by the Institute for the Promotion of the Less Than One Millimetre, is the [...]

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The Biodiversity of Other Worlds

December 19, 2009

Warning: This post contains mild Avatar spoilers.
I want to show you something. Pull the slider bar across to 1:37 in this clip of the Jim Henson masterpiece and my favorite childhood film, “The Dark Crystal,” and watch until about 2:33.

Amazing, huh? It’s made even more amazing by the fact that all these creatures were real [...]

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On the Origin of Flowers

December 15, 2009

A few posts ago, I told you that star anise is interesting because it belongs to a group of plants that split from the rest of the other flowering plants early on, and that for a long time, scientists felt plants like these retained a lot of the features of the first flowers.
Scientists think that [...]

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Bad Taxonomy Kills

December 12, 2009

Just in case you thought taxonomy was a strictly useless pursuit . . .
. . . and you can see how skates fit into the rest of the cartilaginous fish (fish with cartilage skeletons like sharks) here.

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Giant Predatory Marine Nemertine Worms Ate My Homework

December 9, 2009

In case you missed it in the last few weeks, BBC’s new “Life” series (narrated by the great D.A.!) released an amazing clip of a starfish and marine nemertine (aka ribbon) worm feeding frenzy in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. They won’t allow video embedding, but go here for the superlarge youtube video in all its glory. [...]

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Weird, Wonderful Benthic Squid

December 4, 2009

The sort of things we find when we just start looking . . .

I really, really, really, wanted to finish up my posts on paleodicots tonight, but it isn’t going to happen as I’m leaving town early tomorrow morning for the weekend and still have to pack. So instead, I wanted to give you a [...]

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Is Biodiversity More or Less Threatened Than We Thought?

December 2, 2009

You all have gathered, I’m sure, that I have a love/hate relationship with the term “biodiversity”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but it gets used so much in so many vague ways that I feel it turns a lot of people off to the subject in the same way “family values” and “social justice” [...]

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