The Award Winning Hell Creek Mural

See the Big One!
There's a very good article up at Lines and Colors, an art blog I follow, about Paleoart; Paleoart being the depiction of dinosaurs and the like. Link to the big image and check out the detail. Of course, this kind of thing is immensely challenging for the research alone: the foliage is gorgeous, but no doubt, accurate. If you were born before CGI these types of images were what hooked you on dinosaurs. I love the expressions of the reptiles, that's what makes it seem so live.

Snakebot! Bio-Robotics from Carnegie Mellon

Boing Boing posted this video today and I'm in love with the science. Animal locomotion is a peculiar study from both mechanical and evolutionary perspectives. The snakebot can not only climb but swim, which is an entirely different kind of motion if you've ever seen a snake in the water. It blew my mind to read that some bats can swim as well, using their wings as oars. Other aquatic bio-robotics include the jellyfish bots.

Lechuguilla, the most beautiful cave in the world.

Glassy pools, extremophile bacteria, mineral chandeliers: welcome to Lechuguilla. There's a slideshow at Nova if you want more pics of gorgeous caves. For the triple feature, check out the blog A Time To Get for a field trip to The Rock Yard, and some astonishing photos of granite.

Check out the Gorgeous Spiders

Unlike silkworms, spiders will fight among themselves. That's just one of the problems faced by researchers trying to recreate a technology from the 1880s to harvest natural spider silk. The spiders themselves are more incredible than the fabric; I've never seen the like.

in reference to:

1 Million Spiders Make Golden Silk for Rare Cloth | Wired Science | Wired.com

(view on Google Sidewiki)

Oolala! Tentaculum!

Freaky New Ghostshark ID’d Off California Coast | Wired Science | Wired.com
Previously, my favorite shark was the cookie-cutter shark, an ancient shark that was known as the most bioluminescent of its kind. This might be even better. It has a thing coming off its forhead for mating. Handy for a quickie, I guess.

A Fossil of a Dinosaur Giving Birth

Found this in my RSS feeds today: a cool article at Not Exactly Rocket Science shows a prehistoric animal actually giving birth. There's more than one fossil like this around I gather. Beautiful.