Organisms
pharyngula | July 13, 2016But wouldn't you know it, it's an endangered species. If it weren't for that, I'd happily wear Telipogon diabolicus on my lapel everywhere.
pharyngula | July 11, 2016Our HHMI students are going to the Morris Theater tonight to watch Finding Dory (fish are biological, so it fits). You're all welcome to join us at 7!
Southern Blue Tang
pharyngula | July 8, 2016
Conodonts are strange and extinct animals that left behind lots of fossils: their teeth. Practically nothing else but teeny-tiny, jagged, pointy teeth. I remember when the animals themselves were total mysteries, and no one even knew what phylum they belonged to -- it was only in the 1980s that a few eel-like soft tissue fossils were found, and they were recognized as chordates (very small chordates, on the order of millimeters to centimeters long) with big eyes and membranous fins.
And now today I find two artistic reconstructions of the conodont animal that please me.
Nix Draws Stuff…
pharyngula | July 8, 2016
This is kind of awesome: cephalopods only have one kind of photoreceptor, so it was thought that they would be only able to see the world in shades of gray. Those amazingly clever camouflage tricks they pull? That was just matching intensities and textures, fooling our eyes. But now someone has figured out a way they could see color, and special bonus, it also explains those funky weird pupil shapes, like you see in the cuttlefish eye to the right.
They use chromatic aberration! We think of chromatic aberration as an imaging problem -- it's caused by the fact that the degree refraction of…
pharyngula | July 1, 2016The theme of this year's con is "…and how do we GET there", which means we really should have a session on octopus locomotion.
pharyngula | June 10, 2016
Who among you has taught or studied vertebrate anatomy? I have. It's cool. Skeletal and muscular anatomy are weird, though, because we so take the principles for granted that we're often not aware of it. We can move because we have a jointed framework, a collection of levers that are moved by the contractions of muscle fibers, which have distinctive attachments and insertions via tendons on those bones (or, in some cases, the muscles attach to sheets of connective tissue called fascia). The musculoskeletal part of anatomy classes consists of a lot of memorization of muscles, their origins…
pharyngula | June 8, 2016I keep telling students that the key thing in photography is lighting.
Amy Roth
pharyngula | June 3, 2016 Kate Fenhalls
As I just explained, however, the erotic possibilities will remain unexplored.
pharyngula | May 16, 2016Every morning at this hour they wake me up with their chirping and cheeping. It's spring, and the mating season, and the circle of life must go on. Heh.
