A naked eye 3D pterosaur installation at Shanghai Natural History Museum
(The guide is describing the exhibit and talking about the various “flying dinosaurs” and their appearance through history as they emerge from the fossil displays)
This is so cool. I’ve been to a LOT of natural history museums and have never seen anything so creative and also what a terrific way to demonstrate a possible mode of and reason for flight evolution.
Banded Linsang (Prionodon linsang), family Prionodontidae, Thailand
Once thought to be in the Viverridae, with genets and civets, the 2 species of Asian Linsangs were placed in their own family in 2004, based on genetic data.
They are actually more closely related to the family Felidae.
can we please acknowledge that tma/tme is a meaningful distinction? a justice of the US supreme court is openly saying that it’s legal to discriminate against trans women because the same laws do not target trans men. the transmisogyny is what makes it permissible. your transphobia is fine as long as it has carveouts for men.
Photo 1: Alipes multicostis from Cameroon, Africa. (Credit: UG, modified)
Photo 2: Aspects of ultimate legs in Alipes spp.
(A) Posterior trunk with leaf-like ultimate legs in Alipes multicostis Immhoff, 1854 (Original A. Ruppert).
(B) Schematic representation of posterior trunk and ultimate legs in Alipes spp. (compiled after Alipes grandidieri; (Iorio, 2003) and Alipes crotalus (Gerstaecker, 1854); and own data).
These toads look absolutely crazy. Like, look at the new species Nectophrynoides uhehe:
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Photo credit: Michele Menegon
Or the closely related Nectophrynoides viviparus, which was described in 1905 but which we revised in this paper.
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Photo credit: Michele Menegon
These are unlike most toads you might know. They live in trees and bushes of the rainforest, crawling and leaping about!
But neither ecology nor apperance are nearly the craziest part: These toads are live bearing! Females carry huge litters, sometimes >100 young, until they complete their development, and give birth to these tiny, fully formed toadlets.
CW: Preserved specimen of a pregnant toad below the cut.
if I had like 100 million dollars I would get a house with lots of really tall rooms and many walls made of glass so you could see whats in lots of the other rooms and then I would get like models of like 10,000 different really strange polyhedra and then put shelves on every wall and then put them ordered in a grid like pattern like this along every wall and maybe continuing suspended from the roof as well. and then I would play like scary minimalist ambient music at all times and have lots of strange mazelike halls so I would always pass a lot of polyhedra every time I had to go anywhere and it would be really strange
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