Chirotherium by Zdeněk Burian
by: Michael Buble
Photos: Kyrgyz People Cling to Tradition in Forbidding Corner of Northern Afghanistan
Photographer Matthieu Paley spent more than a decade photographing the Afghan Kyrgyz people, who live in one of the world’s most remote and inhospitable areas.
Read the full story here
I always have way more fun drawing pterosaurs doing non-flying-related things. Although they’ve traditionally been depicted as sprawling and ungainly on the ground, the anatomy of many pterosaurs actually suggests they stood semi-erect (or fully erect in some types) and were competent at walking and even running.
So this is a male Pteranodon sternbergi (sometimes assigned to its own genus and called Geosternbergia sternbergi instead). Pteranodon is probably the most well-known pterosaur — over 1000 specimens have been found — and most of the time when a movie or TV show depicts a pterosaur it’s either a Pteranodon or a weird chimeric mash-up between it and Rhamphorhynchus.
Pteranodon specimens show marked sexual dimorphism, with the large-crested males being about one-and-a-half times bigger than the small-crested females.
Butterfly Stew
via jtotheizzoe:
What happens inside a pupa stays inside a pupa. Or it used to, anyway. Until recently, when special x-ray imagers were turned on a developing butterfly to elucidate its metamorphosis.
the process of caterpillar-to-butterfly is a messy one. An overfed worm not only has to convert a lot of the stored energy it gathered stuffing its face for a few weeks into new body parts, it does so by essentially dissolving much of its body and reforming. The pupa isn’t so much a dressing room for a beautiful diva as it is a bag to keep all the goopy globs of proto-butterfly from dripping on the ground. Sounds like both butterfly and human puberty involve a mess of bodily fluids and hiding in your room.
That’s what most biology books would have you believe anyway. This new work (written up in great detail by Ed Yong) demonstrates that while there’s still plenty of goop-globbing, quite a few structures remain intact, migrating and growing into adult forms in a more traditional way (like those blue circulation vessels). For the insect nerds in the bunch, this technique doesn’t revolutionize metamorphosis or anything, but it’s a view inside that most of us have never gotten.
And quite a view it is.
What is Evolution?
via jtotheizzoe:
Excellent video from Stated Clearly explaining just what evolution is … using great illustrations from Rosemary Mosco’s Bird and Moon comics.
This is a great video to share with friends/enemies/confused relatives that might have trouble accepting evolution and how simple it can be to understand.
I’d like to add one thing to this video. Single amoebas, pairs of parents and a few children are used in these evolution illustrations to simplify the concept of evolution, but it’s important to remember that evolution is something that happens to populations, not individuals. The changes within a generation are random. It’s only after those changes have been passed on for several generations that a survival advantage or disadvantage (followed by either more or less individuals carrying the trait) occurs. That’s where evolution happens, it’s not in the change itself. And sometimes even harmful traits can become frequent in a population, like we see in diseases that are prevalent among isolated ethnic groups.
Bonus: I’d also recommend Understanding Evolution’s “Common Misconceptions” FAQ for those who want to dig deeper.
just feel the smell
just freedom
just touring
just fall down
