Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods

A 1910 book about funny critters that may or may not have vexed lumberjacks of yesteryear, now abailable as an online hypertext edition.

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Other blogs.

You’re stuck with ’em for now, I can’t be bothered.

It’s Sea Monster Week at Tetrapod Zoology.

Caenorhabditis elegans lacks eyes, yet sees, per The Other 95%.

A Neatorama trifecta, as they bring us the giant rubber energy-crisis-solving snake, the Nietzsche Family Circus, and I Met the Walrus.

The Reptoid Research Center.

“In quest of the answer to the age-old question, ‘ARE WE ALONE?,’ we’ve been conditioned to stare into space when thinking about “Aliens” and “E.Ts.” This is a classical magicians distraction. We should, instead, be searching under Earth’s surface, in the thousands of miles of underground tunnels, caverns and caves systems. That is where we will discover other forms of intelligent lifeand our visiting Extraterrestrials bases of operations.”

John Rhodes
Researcher – Phenomena Analyst

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Martian trilobites, crinoids, and seashells.

This guy sees them in NASA’s pictures.  e.g.

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This just in- dragonflies eat midgets!

Image links to screen capture on Flickr

According to this Wikipedia article, at around 5 pm on Wednesday, April 9, 2008:

“Dragonflies typically eat mosquitoes, little peoples, and other small insects…”

“Little peoples” linking here.

Before germ theory…

According to Pink Tentacle:

Long ago in Japan, human illness was commonly believed to be the work of tiny malevolent creatures inside the body. Harikikigaki, a book of medical knowledge written in 1568 by a now-unknown resident of Osaka, introduces 63 of these creepy-crawlies and describes how to fight them with acupuncture and herbal remedies.

How to make an edible Flying Spaghetti Monster

(da pic iza link, natch)

Dig also the Flickr set. From Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

Elsewhere geblogkt: Neatorama, Pharyngula, BoingBoing

Speaking of Eurypterids…

weird_crustacean [sic]
Originally uploaded by Ayla Sunshine

Update 20100215: Before the adolescent troll pile on in the comments gets any worse, let me explain that this is a production still from “Chased by Dinosaurs”: wkpda, YouTube.

The Snouters- Form and Life of the Rhinogrades by Harald Stumpke

…being the natural history of an adaptive radiation of small mammals whose key innovation was a remarkable nasal plasticity. Long out of print but not particularly hard to find, I’ve scanned the plates and figures and put them on Flickr. But you really owe it to yourself to scare up a copy of the book, particularly if you’re a fan of the Codex Seraphinianus, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, that kinda thing. The wikipedia treatment is pretty anemic. That’s all the time I got, fortunately for you a real blogger is more forthcoming with details and links, and has even found taxidermied specimens !(1, 2)

Clayton Bailey, aka Dr. Gladstone, a childhood memory recovered by the internet.

I’ve been trying to figure out whose exhibit it was that I saw at the de Young Museum when I was eight (’75), turns out to be this guy. He had an alter-ego, Dr. Gladstone, who discovered a process by which bone turned to ceramic, and “unearthed or created” ceramic fossils from the pre-credulus era of the Bone Age that were on display. He also lectured on the process.
via (via), finally.