Who says scientists can't write? Moselio Schaechter finds a lovely passage about a lowly fungus from 1884.
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John, the self-appointed 'Neurosigntist,' turned up this Korean paragon of inscrutably bizarre signage:
I previously blogged about Jennifer Angus' insect installation, Insecta Fantasia, in the Newark Museum's Victorian Ballantine House.
(A review from Journal of the History of Biology 2004)
and, like just about every story in biology, there's a parasite story there too. Since Pilobolus goes a progress through the guts of a cow and exits in a pile of dung and cows don't graze around such piles it has developed a kind of hydrolic rocket mechanism to launch itself from dung to grass. If that wasn't neat enough the larvae of a lungworm (can't remember which species) that also faces the problem of getting from dung to grass to cow actually invades the Pilobus fungi and gets a free ride.
How come we post about the same unusual organism on the same day?