Here, read these instead

Not much posting this week.  I've been busy getting genetic data from a new batch of specimens for the Beetle Tree of Life project, a process that's always slower than I expect.

Fortunately it turns out that the internet has sites other than mine, and some of those even have interesting things to read and pretty pictures to look at.  Here's what I recommend:

Christopher Taylor discusses the follicle mites that live in your skin.

Ajay Narendra has added some new Meranoplus photos to his ant gallery.

Aydin Ãrstan writes that the Nautilus is still evolving.

Mike Kaspari asks about books that inspire scientists.

Antweb has this lovely photo of an Intergalactic Space Alien Ant Queen.

The BBC is reporting an intermediate snake fossil with legs.

Zooillogix blogs the coolest looking fish discovery ever.

More like this

Welcome to the 32nd edition of the Circus of the Spineless. It our distinguished pleasure to be host here at Deep Sea News. To make it easier for you to navigate through 95%+ of the diversity of animal life, I've developed a dichotomous key to help you work through it. Naturalists will undoubtedly…
This week the blogosphere is busy recapping 2007 with lists of top stories in politics, news, and celebrity haircuts. In all the hoopla surrounding year's end, somehow everyone seems to have forgotten the ants, even though the, um, fast-paced world of Myrmecology has made plenty of discoveries…
An oversized tyrannosaur photo-bombs the Global Ant Project group portrait, November 5-7 2009 at the Chicago Field Museum (photo by Darolyn Striley). Last week I attended a conference ambitiously titled "Global Ant Project synthesis meeting II".  Partly, I went out of curiosity about what this "…
Strumigenys rogeri in the leaf litter In 1982, a small journal called The Coleopterists Bulletin carried a two page note by beetle expert Terry Erwin that increased- by an order of magnitude- the estimated number of species on the planet. Erwin crunched some back-of-the-napkin numbers based on the…