zombie boyfriends love you for your brains

B.C.

home made lamps

fancy lamps

octopus tattoo/ drawings

i believe

http://store.cottonfactory.com/cf-947.html

prehistoric shark

squids wash up on beach in california after earthquake

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oc65PHqWrc

Fossil Hunters Uncover Rare Dinosaur Skin

Even scarcer than hen's teeth would be ... dinosaur skin.

Dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago, and skin isn't quite that long-lived. But on very rare occasions, skin or other soft tissue from extinct animals gets fossilized. And that's what happened to a hadrosaur that died about 66 million years ago in what is now North Dakota.

Phillip Manning and the young man who found the fossil, Tyler Lyson, spent years digging up the hadrosaur, funded in part by the National Geographic Society. Paleontologist Manning, from the University of Manchester in England, says he was "gobsmacked" by what they found.

"The tail is three-dimensional, intact. The skin is like a cone of skin slipped over the skeleton; it's beautiful. The arm is just ... it's like shaking hands with a dinosaur, the three-dimensional skin envelope runs all the way around from the hand all the way up to its armpit. It's quite remarkable."

A Remarkable Set of Circumstances

Writing in the science journalProceedings of the Royal Society B, Manning says the skin isn't actually skin anymore — it was mineralized in a rare confluence of circumstances.

The hadrosaur, a 25-foot-long, duckbilled plant eater, died and was quickly covered by water and silt. The mix of chemicals in the water and the dinosaur's own body allowed the quick buildup of calcium carbonate, which enveloped and invaded the skin. Essentially, the skin turned to stone, but kept its form and texture, like a freeze-dried glove.

"You slice through the skin," says Manning, "and you can see original cell boundaries that have been locked in the calcium carbonate cement of this remarkable fossil." From the outside, the skin looks segmented into geometric shapes, like the outside of a soccer ball.

There's More Than One Way To Skin A Dinosaur

Paleontologists have been pushing the boundaries of their science lately, borrowing technology from chemistry and medical laboratories to tease out molecular information from fossilized dinosaurs.

"Our analytical and imaging facilities are becoming much more sophisticated at a very rapid rate," says Derek Briggs, a paleontologist at Yale University. "And that's yielding all sorts of exciting new results about the chemistry and appearance of these kinds of animals."

For example, researchers have recently extracted what they claim are blood vessels and proteins from the inside of aTyrannosaurus rex bone.

Hadrosaur skin- 66 million years old!

still a good time to be a geologist

*aapg- american association of petroleum geologists*

Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed near Bakersfield, California

The World's Richest and Most Extensive Marine Bone Deposit- Megalodons found.

megalodon

Boylan Bridge Graffiti: The Angry Man (10/08)

clever- Barrel Monster (06/09)

“Well it seems one of Raleigh’s more creative saboteurs is back at it, but this time the culprit has delved into the sculptural side of vandalism. Using the orange construction barrels on Hillsborough Street alongside NCSU, U Live and You Burn constructed a monster-sized barrel man to help divert traffic away from the ongoing road construction.”

Kinky, cross-dressing octopuses shock scientists

The new study reveals just how kinky cephalopod copulation can get

Tom Whipple

Video: watch the octopus encounters

If you only have sex for one brief period of your life, and when you do there are sixteen legs to negotiate, courtship is always likely to be a messy business. With the release of a study into the love life of an Indonesian octopus, scientists have been surprised by just how kinky cephalopod copulation can get.

Octopuses, notoriously shy, have previously resisted attempts to document their amorous behaviour — observations in captivity led researchers to conclude that they were un-romantic loners. Work by marine biologists at the University of California, however, has overturned those assumptions, uncovering a range of mating behaviour that includes flirtation, strangulation and obsessive stalking, as well as the occasional instance of cross-dressing. For females, the researchers discovered, the process is an uncomplicated affair. Observations of Abdopus aculeatus, an octopus the size of an orange that lives in shallow reefs off Sulawesi, found the females to be free with their affections.

For males, mating is a more fraught activity, and the biologists have uncovered three strategies for defeating the competition — which, particularly for the larger females, could be intense.

The stronger males, which they called guarders, stayed close to their partner, often within a metre, and followed it while they foraged. Any interlopers were dealt with harshly — in some cases using strangulation. The researchers speculated that rival males removed competitors’ sperm from the females.

A second group took a more itinerant approach — travelling along the sea bed and wooing females when they found them. Like the guarders, they used striped body patterns to display their manliness.

The most surprising of all were the weakest males, which the researchers called sneakers. Fearing the lash of their competitors’ tentacles, they disguise themselves as females, changing the patterns on their body and swimming in a more feminine manner, to sneak up on their quarry unsuspected.

Unable to remain with their conquest, the sneakers appeared to deal with the problem of sperm removal by taking longer to copulate. The average length of a bout among all octopuses was just under five minutes, but sessions of up to half an hour were observed. After conception, the female lays tens of thousands of eggs, staying in a den to protect them and keep them clean until they hatch. Weakened by the whole process, both the mother and father die within a few months. Christine Huffard, the lead researcher, said. “Octopuses’ once-in-a-lifetime lovemaking sessions are much more than just arm wrestling.”

The study was published in the journal Marine Biology

Side Note:

There are nearly 300 species of octopus in the world, ranging from the giant octopus in the Pacific Ocean to the tiny Octopus wolfi in the tropics. Mating is literally an octopus's life's work and can take place several times a day once the animal reaches sexual maturity. It usually begins with the male octopus poking the female with his long, flexible, hectocotylus arm and then slipping it into her mantle cavity.

giant pacific octopus

atlantic arctic octopus

one day you'll be mine

idea/ inspiration

for the kids

so weird

Felt- Cruiser- Patchwork

lovers not fighters

love me

lady crush: zooey deschannel

Cueva de los Cristales

favorite kind of ridiculousness

adding to my aviary?

something along these lines....

[octopus] body art

seismosaurus

largest dinosaur, 100+ tonnes