Glenn Gould on animals and why they’re better than people.

It’s a YouTube vid for which embedding is disabled, so click here.

It’s a really really really nice fossil…

…but it’s still just a fossil.  I’m referring to Ida, the fossil of what will soon be named Darwinius masillae, which is almost certainly not our direct ancestor.  I don’t have time to go into detail*, here’s someone else’s blog post with tons of links.

*(but I will quip that chains have links, trees don’t)

Sux2B an ant, example # 827.

Direct YouTube link.

Dinosaurs in the Civil War

photo by Robert Kimberly

Dinosaur Kingdom
It’s 1863 and Union soldiers have discovered a hidden valley filled with dinosaurs. Now the Yankees plan to use the dinos as weapons of mass destruction against the South.

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Kunst-Formen der Natur by Ernst Haeckl

All 400 pages on Flickr, or download a 260 MB PDF from here.

“If you had six legs, where would your ass be?”

Nick Park and Creature Comforts weigh in on the origin of life.

Direct YT link
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Extant Anomolacaris look-alike.

Image links to plate in a Flickr stream, but check out the Bibliodyssey post.

Water bears: even more badass than you thought.

They were sent into space and exposed to the cold, the vacuum, the unfiltered cosmic and solar radiations, and they not only survived but upon return reproduced at the same rate as a control group.

Primary source, probably behind a paywall.

Wired’s article.

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Rideable Jules Verne-inspired robots.

Les Machines de l’ile: Official site (in French), Wikipedia,  two Flickr sets 1, 2.

My runaway favorite is the crab larva.

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Arachnologist on teevee

Jason Bond named a spider after Stephen Colbert, precipitating his Warholian quarter-hour.  Here’s a  link to the video at Comedy Central dot com.