Bright lichens reveal dino bones
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 […]
botany
SONG: The Temples Resurrect These Fallen Trees.
SONG: “The Temples Resurrect These Fallen Trees”. (OGG version here.) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “Thousands of endangered trees preserved for centuries inside Chinese temples,” […]
Science Art: Lepiota Echinellus, 1887
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 […]
Science Art: La Esperanza Del Río, Micrasterias Truncata, Turberas De Peñayerre
This is a star algae, Micrasterias truncata, as photographed very recently and uploaded to the Flickr Commons collection, “Encyclopedia of Life images.” The description for […]
Science Art: Cross Section of a Young Root, by Roman Vishniac, c. 1978.
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 […]
The birds, the bees, the… wolves?
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 […]
Science Art: Main floristic types from the Maastrichtian, F. Guillén, 2012.
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 […]
Plants have desires … and the agency to meet them. So are they smart?
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 […]
Science Art: Punica Granatum, 1829
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 […]
Science Art: A Fossil Flower (Cycadeoidea ingens), 1924.
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 […]
Science Art: Flower of Polygonum persicarium distorted by Utricle smut and following figures, by J.E. Sowerby, 1872.
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 […]
The largest plant in the world stretches over 180 km and is 4,500 years old. And fish like it.
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: […]
Science Art: Bole cross section of common hazel (Corylus avellana), by Annika Karusion, 2011
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 […]
Tomato plants have a kind of nervous system.
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 […]
Science Art: Cypress root system exposed 4 feet deep by wave action…, 1915.
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 […]