Illustration from A pictorial atlas of fossil remains : consisting of coloured illustrations selected from Parkinson’s “Organic remains of a former world,” and Artis’s “Antediluvian phytology” / with descriptions by Gideon Algernon Mantel source: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/97662
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Illustration from A pictorial atlas of fossil remains : consisting of coloured illustrations selected from Parkinson’s “Organic remains of a former world,” and Artis’s “Antediluvian phytology” / with descriptions by Gideon Algernon Mantel

source: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/97662

(via scientificillustration)

Source: biodiversitylibrary.org

Oldtime Songster, the Wyoming Grig Found among the high-elevation sagebrush of Wyoming, the sagebrush grig, or Cyphoderris strepitans, is one of the oldest insects living today. They date from the Triassic age, some 250 million years ago. Grigs now survive in a few places in the Rockies and the Sichuan Province of China. They’re direct descendants of the family that some entomologists believe first developed complex courtship songs, and are the only modern insects that can sing at subfreezing temperatures. (via Lost Worlds Survive in Living Fossils | Wired Science | Wired.com)
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Oldtime Songster, the Wyoming Grig

Found among the high-elevation sagebrush of Wyoming, the sagebrush grig, or Cyphoderris strepitans, is one of the oldest insects living today. They date from the Triassic age, some 250 million years ago.

Grigs now survive in a few places in the Rockies and the Sichuan Province of China. They’re direct descendants of the family that some entomologists believe first developed complex courtship songs, and are the only modern insects that can sing at subfreezing temperatures.

(via Lost Worlds Survive in Living Fossils | Wired Science | Wired.com)

Source: Wired

Prehistoric Colors Preserved in Near-Perfect Beetle Fossils

Despite being tens of millions of years old, some beetle fossils appear almost as they did in life. Not only are their shape and structure preserved, but so are the actual colors of their shells, which have changed only slightly in the intervening eons.

Though relatively little-known, these fossils represent the purest of biological colors retrieved from deep time, far richer than much-celebrated pigment traces of dinosaur plumage and more varied than the hues of a few ancient plants.

From Wired: Science

“Well, I just think they’re just about the most romantic thing you can imagine. I guess I was about eight when I first hit a rock and it fell apart and I saw, inside that rock, a shining, glittering, perfect seashell complete in every detail, and knowing that nobody had seen that before, and it had been laying without the sun shining on it for 100 or 200 million years. Now, that seems to me unbelievably romantic. And fossils have always seemed to me that way. There’s also the part of the treasure hunt in it, of course, you know, of finding things and collecting things. And who knows what you’re going to find when you turn over the next rock. But basically, it’s that thrill of looking at animals that lived a million, 10 million, 100 million years ago. ” – Sir David Attenborough, NPR Weekend Edition, Oct 24, 2010
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“Well, I just think they’re just about the most romantic thing you can imagine. I guess I was about eight when I first hit a rock and it fell apart and I saw, inside that rock, a shining, glittering, perfect seashell complete in every detail, and knowing that nobody had seen that before, and it had been laying without the sun shining on it for 100 or 200 million years. Now, that seems to me unbelievably romantic. And fossils have always seemed to me that way. There’s also the part of the treasure hunt in it, of course, you know, of finding things and collecting things. And who knows what you’re going to find when you turn over the next rock. But basically, it’s that thrill of looking at animals that lived a million, 10 million, 100 million years ago. ”

– Sir David Attenborough, NPR Weekend Edition, Oct 24, 2010

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Source: cystallineambermoments