Organisms
Pharyngula
Category archives for Organisms
Mary’s Monday Metazoan: Is she trying to tell me something?
Posted by PZ Myers on April 23, 2013 My wife tells me I ought to feature a fish that’s actually called the Sarcastic Fringehead on the blog — it’s a natural. I wonder if she was being sarcastic, but she looked so innocent when she told me.
Coelacanths are unexceptional products of evolution
Posted by PZ Myers on April 20, 2013 The coelacanth genome has been sequenced, which is good news all around…except that I found a few of the comments in the article announcing it disconcerting. They keep calling it a “living fossil” — and you know what I think of that term — and they keep referring to it as evolving slowly The slowly…
Friday Cephalopod: No, you’re not safe anywhere
Posted by PZ Myers on April 19, 2013 It’s a big image, so it’s going below the fold.
Botanical Wednesday: Spring is coming!
Posted by PZ Myers on April 17, 2013 At least, that’s what I keep telling myself as yet another snowstorm bears down on us. (source)
Mary’s Monday Metazoan: Ol’ Three-Eyes
Posted by PZ Myers on April 15, 2013 It’s a frog tadpole with an eye surgically grafted to its trunk! Wait, this is an old story — similar experiments were done at least 20 years ago. You can transplant developing eyes to the tadpole, but the cool thing is that the donor optic nerves will grow into the sensory tracts of the dorsal…
Friday Cephalopod: Where’s Michelangelo when you need him?
Posted by PZ Myers on April 12, 2013 (from the TONMO page on Cephalopod Ethics)
Botanical Wednesday: One, two, three…ha ha ha…four, five, six, SEVEN. Seven purple tentacles, ha ha ha!
Posted by PZ Myers on April 11, 2013 Sorry, I was looking at this Akebia flower, and for some reason I felt a compulsion to count the number of carpels, and I did it out loud in the voice of Sesame Street’s Count. It’s been a long day of proofreading and I’m home all alone, and I think I’m getting punchy. I should…
Mary’s Monday Metazoan: The Too-Common Sludge Duck
Posted by PZ Myers on April 9, 2013 This is a very special bird from Arkansas that will become much more common with more oil pipelines running through the middle of the country. Won’t it be great to be able to readily make an entry in your birding book, soon enough?
Friday Cephalopod: Reach!
Posted by PZ Myers on April 5, 2013 (via the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Hey, I just realized that it’s been about 25 years since I’ve been to Monterey Bay…I should go again.)
Mary’s Monday Metazoan: Denizens of the icy deeps
Posted by PZ Myers on April 1, 2013 You know those deep icy fields of methane hydrates Japan wants to tap for natural gas? (One of the worst ideas ever, by the way.) They’re inhabited, by polychaetes like Hesiocaeca methanicola. (via NatGeo, which is a bit too uncritical of the idea for my taste.)