Author: Lori Jia
Vicki writes, “This coelacanth is on my abdomen. I’ve been fond of these rare, distant relatives for a while, and got this inked a couple of years ago.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published July 5, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Laura writes:
“This is a tattoo of the prairie grass Andropogon gerardii, or big blue stem. My masters research involved land disturbance, mycorrhizae and soil properties associated with this & two other common prairie plants.
Also notice that this tattoo is over a wicked scar from a car accident where I shattered my calcaneus. More than half of a prairie plant is below ground, keeping the plant alive during regular disturbances (such as fire or grazing). The extensive root system over my repaired heal symbolizes stability, strength and recovery. I had the obscure idea, but the artist (Kit) made my botanical mumblings a reality.”
I have a fondness for graphs, especially ones that let you survey the sweep of life’s history in one glance. Here’s a new one, out today in the journal Science. It’s the latest look at the levels of biodiversity over the past half billion years. Scientists crunched the numbers on about 3.5 million fossils of ocean-dwelling invertebrates, using more detailed data than in previous surveys. (Some marine invertebrates leave fabulous heaps of fossils. Other species, like our own, are more delicate.) The horizontal axis marks time, and the vertical one marks the number of genera alive at any particular interval of about 10 million years. (Genera are groups of species. The genus Homo includes us, Neanderthals, and a few other extinct hominids, for example.)
Rebecca writes:
“Attached is a picture of my science tattoo. It is a Marsh Pick, with a series of Pentaceratops vertebra, and a blue peace sign. I am a vertebrate paleontologist and geologist who works on ceratopsid dinosaurs. Since I am a southerner, I choose a southern species of ceratopsian (Pentaceratops sternbergi), from New Mexico. I love the color blue, so I went with the blue peace sign. The whole design is based after the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, but altered to fit my specific passions.”
I’m going to be posting my blogroll to my new digs as soon as I get the chance. And to that list I will be adding BdellaNea. It’s the work of Mark Siddall, a scientist at the American Museum of Natural History who specializes in leeches.
I wrote about Mark in this 2006 article for the New York Times, and last weekend at the meeting of the American Society for Parasitologists we caught up briefly. He’d been off to Zambia and various other seething leech hot spots since I’d last seen him, and at the meeting he and his students were presenting lots of new research, including some insights into how different species of leeches thin your blood.
Continue reading “A Leech Blog. If You Build It, We Will Come.”