Inverts
laelaps | July 6, 2010
A normal giant gliding ant (left) and an infested ant (right). The red color of the gaster is not caused by a pigment, but thinning of the exoskeleton combined with the color of the nematode eggs. From Yanoviak et al, 2008.
In one of my favorite episodes of the animated TV show Futurama, the chief protagonist - delivery boy Philip J. Fry - becomes infested with worms after eating a dodgy egg-salad sandwich purchased from the restroom of an interstellar truck stop. Lucky for Fry, the parasites are beneficial - they repair his injuries and greatly enhance his cognitive abilities. ("Of all…
laelaps | July 1, 2010
The trailer for Shaun of the Dead.
Not all zombies are created equal. The most popular zombie archetype is a shambling, brain-eating member of the recently deceased, but, in recent films from 28 Days Later to Zombieland, the definition of what a zombie is or isn't has become more complicated. Does a zombie have to be a cannibal corpse, or can a zombie be someone infected with a virus which turns them into a blood-crazed, fast-running monster?
For my own part, I have always preferred the classic George Romero zombies from the original Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead films (as well as…
laelaps | June 21, 2010
A restoration of the tiny trilobite Ctenopyge ceciliae. From Schoenemann et al, 2010.
The first time I can remember seeing a trilobite, it wasn't in a museum case or a book about prehistoric animals. It was on card 39 of the gratuitously gory Dinosaurs Attack! card series, a horrific vignette depicting four of the invertebrates crawling over the bloodied face of their hapless victim. (No indication was given as to how the "flesh-eating worms", as the card identified them, had subdued the man.) The card was entirely fiction, of course, but it still fit in with the image of trilobites as mud…
laelaps | June 4, 2010
The "common cuttle-fish." From Mysteries of the Ocean.
About three decades before On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection would forever change biological science, the aspiring young naturalists Pierre-Stanislas Meyranx and Laurencet submitted a paper on mollusks to France's prestigious Academie des Sciences. For weeks they waited for a patron from within the scientific elite to recognize their work, but no response came. Ultimately they decided to take the more direct route of having the paper examined by a commission, and in 1830 the naturalists Pierre-Andre Latreille and…
laelaps | May 20, 2010
Mammal hairs preserved in amber specimen ARC2-A1-3. a - First fragment; b - Line drawing of first fragment; c - Second fragment; d - Line drawing of second fragment; e - Close-up of second fragment to show the cuticular surface.
About 100 million years ago, in a coastal forest located in what is today southwestern France, a small mammal skittered up the trunk of a conifer tree. As it did so it lost a few of its hairs, and this minor event would have been entirely unremarkable if two of those hairs had not settled in some tree sap and, in the course of time, become entombed in a piece of…
laelaps | May 19, 2010
If for no other reason, I love the American Museum of Natural History because it contains a web of seemingly endless nooks and crannies to explore. One, just far enough away from the main exhibit halls to go unnoticed by most visitors (it is not even denoted on the museum map anymore), is a collection of seashells from a time when neatly-arrayed collections of specimens set in place next to their identification labels formed the core of natural history museums. Most are relatively familiar, curled houses without their occupants, but there is one which immediately grabbed my attention the…
laelaps | May 13, 2010
Components of the newly-described Fezouata fauna. a, Demosponge Pirania auraeum b, Choiid demosponge c, Annelid worm d, Organism showing possible similarities to halkieriids e, Possible armoured lobopod f, Thelxiope-like arthropod g, Marrellomorph arthropod, probably belonging to the genus Furca h, Skaniid arthropod i, Spinose arthropod appendage
apparatus consisting of six overlapping elements. From Van Roy et al, 2010.
When the Cambrian period comes up in conversation, it is usually in reference to the evolutionary "explosion" which occurred around 530 million years ago. Animal fossils…
laelaps | April 23, 2010
For at least 30 million years, bone-eating worms have been making their homes in the bodies of decomposing whales on the seabottom, but the rotting cetacean carcasses are not just food sources for the polychaetes.
The term "worm" immediately conjures up images of the red, squiggly things which crawl all over the sidewalk after it rains, but this imagery does not fit the boneworms of the genus Osedax. These worms start off life as sexless larvae, and the timing of their arrival at a whale corpse makes all the difference as to whether they will be male or female. If the larva lands on the…
laelaps | April 15, 2010
Top of the encrusted surface of a brachiopod shell, showing the "war" between an edrioasteroid (star-shaped organism at center) and a fast-growing bryozoan colony. From Sprinkle and Rodgers 2010.
Back in the early days of paleontology, when the meaning and origin of fossils was still in doubt, some naturalists believed that the shells, shark teeth, and other petrified curiosities were attempts by the rock to imitate life. Fossils were not true vestiges of history, it was believed, but instead the product of some "plastic virtue" suffused throughout the non-living Creation. As naturalists…
laelaps | March 29, 2010
The fail whale comes to rest; the decomposing body of a gray whale is host to a diverse array of scavengers and other deep sea organisms. From Goffredi et al., 2004.
In the deep sea, no carcass goes to waste. Platoons of crabs, fish, and other scavengers make short work of most of the bodies which come to rest on the sea bottom, but every now and then the carrion-eaters are presented with a rotting bonanza; a whale fall. Muscle, viscera, blubber, and bone; it all gets broken down, but it takes so long that the whale carcass actually provides a temporary home for a variety of organisms…
laelaps | March 24, 2010
Megarachne, (changed to Mesothelae for broadcast) restored as an enormous spider in the series Before the Dinosaurs: Walking With Monsters.
Imagine that you are are standing in a massive junkyard with the remains of cars strewn all about you. A few are relatively complete, but most of the heap is made up of bits and pieces of models from the entire history of automotive innovation. If you were to reach down and pick up one of the scraps, would you be able to tell the make and model of the car it came from?
The challenges a paleontologist faces in reconstructing the life of the past are…
laelaps | March 12, 2010
When it comes to aliens, Hollywood really does not have much imagination. Most extraterrestrials that have appeared on the big screen look very much like us, or are at least some kind of four-to-six-limbed vertebrate, and this says more about out own vanity than anything else. It would be far more interesting, I think, to take the weird and wonderful organisms of the Cambrian as inspiration for alien life forms, and two new critters have just been added to the odd Cambrian menagerie.
A restoration of Herpetogaster collinsi by Marianne Collins. From Caron et al, 2010.
What was three…
laelaps | February 15, 2010
A horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus), photographed at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.
laelaps | February 9, 2010
Shrimp is fancy food for anyone's dinner table. Boiled, baked, grilled, poached... the culinary possibilities are almost endless, and the low price of shrimp at grocers and superstores makes it easy for us to keep on eating. Yet this abundance of shrimp obscures the true costs of the competing industries that keep supermarkets and restaurants supplied, and those stories are at the center of Jack and Anne Rudloe's new book Shrimp: The Endless Quest for Pink Gold.
To be honest, I almost shelved this book without finishing it. After an interesting autobiographical introduction about what it is…
laelaps | January 13, 2010
An Atlantic ghost crab (Ocypode quadrata), photographed at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge, Delaware.
laelaps | December 30, 2009
Horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus), photographed at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.
laelaps | November 8, 2009
Sand flies (black bits) and brine shrimp (pink bits) at the edge of the Great Salt Lake. Photographed at Antelope Island, Utah.
laelaps | November 1, 2009
A slab containing many specimens of the Jurassic ammonite Dactylioceras. Photographed at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point, Utah.
laelaps | October 15, 2009
An arabesque orbweaver spider (Neoscona arabesca) photographed on Antelope Island, Utah. This species, about the size of a quarter, was a common sight among the sunflowers.