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Taken with instagram

Forever in Amber photos by Anders Leth Damgaard

What I previously knew about insects trapped in amber was that they were future dinosaurs. What I didn’t know until recently that it also made for stunning art, these ancient insects preserved in death for millions of years, with only a thin layer of hardened amber separating our world from theirs. I’m still holding out for future velociraptors but I don’t mind admiring these tiny contained universes in the meantime.

(Source: ianbrooks, via insectlove)

tacticalshoyu:

Bugs on Book Covers by Rose Sanderson

(via buggielady)

tastefullyoffensive:

[via]

insectlove:

muckledeedun: another pretty stink bug from costa rica

nicklasl:

Hooded Crow (Corvus corone cornix, Grå Kråka) on Flickr.

(via allcreatures)

drueisms:

Wow Wednesday - Wasps that are smaller than amoebas

Thrips are tiny insects, typically just a millimetre in length. Some are barely half that size. If that’s how big the adults are, imagine how small a thrips’ egg must be. Now, consider that there are insects that lay their eggs inside the egg of a thrips.

That’s one of them in the image above – the wasp, Megaphragma mymaripenne. It’s pictured next to a Paramecium and an amoeba at the same scale. Even though both these creatures are made up of a single cell, the wasp – complete with eyes, brain, wings, muscles, guts and genitals – is actuallysmaller. At just 200 micrometres (a fifth of a millimetre), this wasp is the third smallest insect alive and a miracle of miniaturisation.

Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has 850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the wasp can fly, search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.

Click through to read more about this ridiculously awesome animal.

(via insectlove)

Painting dad (Taken with instagram)

My triumph :) (Taken with instagram)

allcreatures:

A Pallas cat snarls as photographer Roy McPeak takes its photo at the Highland Wildlife Centre, Kingussie, in the Highlands of Scotland. The Pallas Cat is a wild cat, about the size of a domestic cat, found mainly in the central Asian steppe of Mongolia, China and the Tibetan Plateau.

Picture: Roy McPeak/Solent News & Photo Agency (via Pictures of the day: 18 May 2012 - Telegraph)