What happens when squirrels invade the tundra? Well, in one case, they got chubby, fluffy, flappy-tailed, and occasionally kinda cranky, sorta like a hydrophobic alpine beaver. Here in the Rockies, they’re called yellow-bellied marmots. Until recently, I’d rarely seen one and had never heard one call. They seemed to maintain a strict code of silence [...]

I hope you’ll forgive a post with no point other than to share a few photos. Yesterday I drove to Chicago in search of an ant I’d not yet photographed for an Ants of North America project. The ant is the charismatic Dolichoderus mariae, a species that isn’t actually all that rare but seems to magically elude [...]

Animals with backbones (vertebrates) make up only 4% of the species on our planet. Yet when you walk into a natural history museum, they’re all you see. The dinosaur skeletons stretching across a ballroom? Vertebrates. Dioramas starring posed buffalo, lions, or zebra? Vertebrates. The endless cases of delicate stuffed birds? You guessed it: vertebrates. “It’s [...]

The University of Montana’s natural history museum in Missoula is the “largest zoological museum in Montana and one of the major zoological collections of the Northern Rocky Mountains,” according to its website. Its collections hold 14,500 mammalian specimens, 7,000 birds, 3,200 fish, and 320 reptiles and amphibians. However, it’s different than the typical ideal of [...]

Mistletoe is frequently spotted hanging above lovers’ heads in terrible holiday specials–but only during one month of the year. That makes it easy to forget that more than 1,300 species hang in forests year-round, parasitizing thousands of tree species around the world. Or, rather, hemiparasitizing, which means the plant is partially self-sufficient: it has its [...]

The Southern Ontario Nature & Science Illustrators’ (SONSI) exhibit is on right now in Toronto. I used to be webmaster-blogger for this amazing group – and I would be hard-pressed to find a more professional, fun, and above all talented group of illustrators anywhere. These are the people you want illustrating your ebooks on biodiversity [...]

Have you ever tried to draw what you see in your dreams? Sometimes even the act of describing a dream in words makes it evaporate, as though imposing the order of grammar and syntax is too much for its fragile structure to bear. Tiffany Bozic does not paint her dreams, per se, but she does [...]

One of the most popular fields of science with children and adults alike is paleontology. And there’s a very good reason for this. Since the first fossil was recognized and found, it inspired imaginations to envision what the animal was like when it was alive. From the myths of giant cyclops to sinewy dragons, fossils [...]

As I’ve pointed out before on Symbiartic, before the modern naturalist movement, nature lovers would shoot and kill the objects of their fancy to get a better look. Audubon himself would take dead specimens and pin them into life-like poses before drawing them and turning them into the prints that are so treasured today. But [...]

This bust of Dryptosaurus was sculpted by paleoartist Tyler Keillor for the Lake County Discovery Museum just outside of Chicago, Illinois. Tyler, a full-time paleoartist at the University of Chicago, is one of the many science artists taking the bull by the horns and diving into fundraising for their own work. He’s started a project [...]

From: Louis Figuier, The Ocean World: Being a description of the sea and some of its inhabitants, 1872. Perusing the stacks in the University of Chicago’s Crerar Library one day, I found this gem of a book – a richly illustrated account of sea creatures from 1872 by a naturalist named Louis Figuier. In it [...]

Just as my parents can recall their first television sets and marvel at how I have never known life without it, and we can all remember our first cell phone while our children ping from iPhone to iPad and think nothing of video chatting with friends thousands of miles away, it’s hard for most of [...]

It’s easy to to be impressed when you walk the halls of museums by the quality and quantity of specimens on display, but it is only a fraction of what institutions like the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University and other comparable institutions have in their collections. This year, the Academy celebrates its 200th [...]