Blogger’s note: I’m still away from the blog for a few weeks. In the meantime, here is another post from the Artful Amoeba archive. It originally appeared on October 4, 2010. I recently read a delightful leaflet on water bears which gave me a whole new appreciate for their anatomy (some of them have armored [...]

When the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico, its odyssey doesn’t end. It enters an underwater valley called the Mississippi Canyon, a world where nutrients from the river nourish some fantastical forms of life. One part of this canyon looks like this: The graceful white sculptures sprouting from carbonate outcrops are Lophelia coral. [...]

Hidden away in calm, sheltered coastal waters is a remarkable little animal: a tiny transparent sheet of cells called a placozoan. Though composed of only a few thousand cells and no more than 25 micrometers thick (a bacterium is about 1 micromter thick), it’s an animal — the simplest we know of.
And hidden inside them, scientists found recently, may be a clue to the Cambrian Explosion

Bored? Looking for things to do? No, me neither. But have some fun and look at these skulls — then identify them (taking care to note your identifications in the comments below). And then… … see if you can go that extra bit further and say something especially interesting*, since there’s lots of neat stuff going [...]

It’s Friday and I’m about to go away on fieldwork for a while, so let’s have some fun (even though substantial media interest in the new Isle of Wight azhdarchoid pterosaur Vectidraco continues unabated). Why not knock yourself out and have a go at identifying this bizarre skeletal tetrapod, surely one of the weirdest things [...]

It’s January 21st, meaning that Tetrapod Zoology is another year older and has now been going for more than seven years. Time once again to look back at the year that’s passed… or, the year as seen from my own personal, Tet Zoo-themed perspective. As per previous birthday events (or, blogoversaries, or whatever), I’m going [...]

Tet Zoo ver 3 – the Sci Am incarnation of this august and influential institution – has now been going for about 10 months, and a moderately respectable 78 articles have appeared on the blog so far (excluding this one). The vast majority have been lengthy, referenced, heavily illustrated articles – no brief, picture-of-the-day-style contributions [...]

As you read this, I’m away (at the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting, in Las Vegas)*. As usual when I’m away, the plan is to have articles set to self-publish during my absence. And here’s one such article – but it’s an unusual one. I have a fairly strict policy of not running guest [...]