A series of type sets made from materials, including soil, hair, paperclips, and gummi bears—all very prettily photographed. The hair one in particular is oddly gross. Soil is my favorite.

Pelicans receive fish at the London Zoo

Pelicans have been perfect since the early Oligocene, according to a newly published analysis of a fossilized bill, and partial skull and neck. The study’s lead author, Antoine Louchart, doesn’t actually want to commit to that interpretation, but the 30-million-year old fossil he reports on is so similar to today’s pelican species that it would be classified in the Pelecanus genus.

Study at J Ornithol

On vacation last month, I saw a squirrel with no hair at all on its tail, and I didn’t have the heart to take a picture of what was, not surprisingly, a very unattractive animal. Here you get the hint of it amidst the great PR.

to start posting my vacation photos!

In margays, though, it’s an explicit imitation of prey. It probably helps that tamarins have some calls that overlap with cat sounds. As Laelaps explains, because vocalizations can be used to mark territory, “a monkey or other prey animal that thinks it is coming over to tell a competitor to buzz off may instead come face-to-face with a margay.”

It actually leaves me breathless, it’s so horrible. On the same building where the above sign appears is this mural (or at least was – I haven’t been back there for a while):

Seriously. What the hell? This time it’s personal!

Well, someone is at least making an effort to be true to SWP’s horrific tagline—”Cover the Earth” (I almost wish I had made that up)—and still make something aesthetically pleasing and that, you know, doesn’t invoke the Union Carbide Bhopal disaster.

See an animated ad on this theme – worth going just for the cardinal depiction. The frog is also awesome. Dear SWP, notice how, in the animation, your logo only appears at a distance where it—and its apocalyptic tagline—cannot be readily discerned. Smart!

Have I mentioned lately how much I love it?

I tagged it “animaladay” automatically even though it wasn’t April anymore. Part of me wants to stop using the tag, because the original commitment is complete, but I will probably keep using something — dailyanimal, maybe. Because what I learned in April was that those minutes, sometimes hours, spent wandering around, making eye contact with animals, and watching them go about their day made every day noticeably better.

Meet Winston. Life was good with his couple. Hip, young, socially conscious, and so attentive that he almost never had to eat contraband to get an obstruction so he could get attention. And then The Baby Happened. That was 8 months ago. We went outside and spent some very focused W time, during which numerous treats were tossed and caught. Winston and other animal-a-day subjects are appearing in my Flickr photostream.

Front Street from California to Sacramento gets closed down for the evening on St Patrick’s Day. Royal Exchange, Harrington’s, and Schroeder’s all open into the street, and the barricades go up in the mid afternoon. These pictures are from 9 AM, noon, 5 PM, and 7 PM. The Paddy Wagon (yes, I went there) wasn’t doing any business—it was just sitting there, flashing its lights from time to time.

I’m doing a terrible job, sometimes going days without taking a picture, but I’m still doing a lot more photography than I was doing last year. The best part is when I finally see something I’d walked past mindlessly countless times before, like this gate and door.

OK, fine. I got detail on the fur of a black cat inside late at night. I guess I understand the appeal of artificial lighting now.

A couple of days ago, Wired Science published a selection of these photos, and you can search the archives at the National Archives (you might want to use the search instructions at the Documerica site at the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism).

Do you feel lucky? A set that’s set to grow.

All-black penguins are so rare there is practically no research on the subject–biologists guess that perhaps one in every quarter million of penguins shows evidence of at least partial melanism, whereas the penguin we saw appears to be almost entirely (if not entirely) melanistic….

Observing this black penguin waddle across South Georgia’s black sand beach revealed no different behavior than that of his fellow penguins. In fact, he seemed to mix well. Regarding feeding and mating behavior there is no real way to tell, but I do know that we were all fascinated by his presence and wished him the best for the coming winter season.

Lots of discussion about this photo and this kind of coloring, plus other links, at the National Geographic blog entry about it.

Stay tuned to see what I end up making. Or, you know, just to snigger at my failure!

“Drunk” bats have no trouble flying under the influence, a new study says.

But “the bats, unfortunately, hadn’t read the proposal,” he said.

Read the National Geographic writeup or the full article at PLoS ONE – rest assured that the female bats were not visibly pregnant or lactating, and all bats got a chance to sober up before they headed home. The National Geographic story also has more pictures of Central American bats, as well as other fun bat links sprinkled throughout its writeup. (Bonus: boozy shrew.)

Eames House by Peter Stackpole, August 1950, part of the Google LIFE collection.

I don’t know how your day starts, but my commute’s become awfully pretty, lately.

Hubert Duprat provided caddis flies with flakes of gold and semiprecious stones to use for building their larvae cases. They usually use grains of sand, particles of mineral or plant material, or bits of fish bone or crustacean shell, but they will use whatever is nearby and suitable to incorporate into their silk-bonded cases (although some are more flexible than others in what they will use). Here is a video and more information about the project, including some remarks by critic and philosopher Christian Besson about behavior and intent.