Science News reports on a colorful breakthrough in dinosaur hunting, thanks to two lichen species that prefer to grow on dinosaur bones and are a shade of orange that’s bright enough… Read the rest “Bright lichens reveal dino bones”
You probably shouldn’t eat these.
This is an illustration of a Lepiota mushroom from the Bulletin de la Société botanique de France. The genus includes quite a few toxic species, … Read the rest “Science Art: Lepiota Echinellus, 1887”
This is a star algae, Micrasterias truncata, as photographed very recently and uploaded to the Flickr Commons collection, “Encyclopedia of Life images.”
The description… Read the rest “Science Art: La Esperanza Del Río, Micrasterias Truncata, Turberas De Peñayerre”
This is an image from “the birth of photomicrography.” It’s also an image from the fondly remembered Omni magazine, an issue from 1978 which I found on archive.org. … Read the rest “Science Art: Cross Section of a Young Root, by Roman Vishniac, c. 1978.”
The journal Ecology has some unusual research about wild pollinators. They’ve found that famous species like honeybees and hummingbirds who spread pollen by daintily zipping … Read the rest “The birds, the bees, the… wolves?”
This is a likeness of the southern bit of South America as it was near the end of the Cretaceous, right before the event that drove the dinosaurs to extinction. The Maastrichtian Age was a geologic… Read the rest “Science Art: Main floristic types from the Maastrichtian, F. Guillén, 2012.”
NPR was one of several outlets covering the release of writer Zoë Schlanger’s new book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life… Read the rest “Plants have desires … and the agency to meet them. So are they smart?”
This tasty-looking fruit is from a medical text – Medical Botany: or, Illustrations and Descriptions of the Medicinal Plants of the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Pharmacopoeias;… Read the rest “Science Art: Punica Granatum, 1829”
This is a photograph of a model from the Field Museum of Natural History, representing a cycad flower reconstructed from a fossil.
The fossil came from the Cycad National Monument, established… Read the rest “Science Art: A Fossil Flower (Cycadeoidea ingens), 1924.”
This is a bunch of smut. Mostly, it’s smut in the genus Ustilago growing on plants in the same genus as knotweed and buckwheat. The long flower in the middle is Polygonum hydropiper… Read the rest “Science Art: Flower of Polygonum persicarium distorted by Utricle smut and following figures, by J.E. Sowerby, 1872.”
The University of Western Australia has singled out a seagrass, Poseidonia australis, in the waters of Shark Bay, Western Australia, as the world’s largest plant:
… Read the rest “The largest plant in the world stretches over 180 km and is 4,500 years old. And fish like it.”UWA student researcher
This is a microscope’s view of a plant’s stem, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons as part of the Estonian Science Photo Competition of 2011, which I can only assume was the forerunner… Read the rest “Science Art: Bole cross section of common hazel (Corylus avellana), by Annika Karusion, 2011”
New Scientist reports on research at the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil, where Gabriela Niemeyer Reissig and colleagues have found that tomatoes being eaten by insects send electrical… Read the rest “Tomato plants have a kind of nervous system.”
Today, Folklore Twitter is celebrating #SwampSunday, so I thought I’d slip this stately scientific illustration into my queue. This is what’s going on underneath that dark,… Read the rest “Science Art: Cypress root system exposed 4 feet deep by wave action…, 1915.”
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