"A year at the shore"

Lovely illustrations of tidepool creatures from a book by 19th-century naturalist Philip Henry Gosse:

He also created some gorgeous illustrations of sea anemones.

"The Rotifera of the Scottish Lochs"

Illustrations of rotifers (microscopic aquatic animals) from a 1906 book. Image from Scientific Illustration.

"Fungi which grow Horizontally..."

 John Hill, 1714?-1775. A general natural history: or, New and accurate descriptions of the animals, vegetables, and minerals, of the different parts of the world. . 3 v. London: Printed for Thomas Osborne, 1748-1752. 72[?], plate 4.

Image source.

X-ray seahorses

circa 1910: An X-ray photograph of pot bellied seahorses (Hippocampus abdominalis).

From a LIFE gallery of x-rays.

Planktonic protists

The word "plankton" shares a Greek root with "planet" (πλαγκτός, meaning drifting or wandering)-- an etymological link which seems particularly appropriate for these drifting microbes, spherical or stellate in form: 

Protists - Cells in the Sea from Parafilms on Vimeo.

This beautiful clip is one of a series called Plankton Chronicles, found via The Book of Barely Imagined Beings.

Sponges and their skeletons

Images of sea sponges from the Report on the Hexactinellida collected by H.M.S. Challenger during the Years1873-76; each image shows a sponge framed by examples of the glass-like spines (called spicules) which make up its "skeleton":

Sea cucumbers also have attractive mineralized parts called spicules, but these function as external armor rather than internal support.

A sample from the abyss

All the tiny creatures in this image came from a sample of ocean-floor sediment.

Image from Deep Sea News.

Collection of seahorses

Seahorses are displayed at an endangered species exhibition at London Zoo. ( Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

From Boston.com's 50 best photos from the natural world. 

Micro-plants

Illustrations of algae, plants, seaweed, and fungi from Common Objects of the Microscope, by John George Wood, 1900:

Diatom mandala

This beautiful design fits on a microscope slide, and the jewel-like objects that compose it are the shells of tiny marine microbes.

Image from Klaus Kemp's diatom art site. Diatom arrangements like these, along with similar arrangements of butterfly scales, were popular in the Victorian era.

Tiny bird, giant ant

The above figure, from Archibald et al. (2011), shows a rufous hummingbird Selasphorus rufus alongside the newly described early Eocene giant ant Titanomyrma lubei. This fossil comes from the American Green River Formation, in present-day Wyoming. At 51 mm in length, this is one of the largest known ants.

Information and picture from Catalogue of Organisms.

This odd juxtaposition of creatures demonstrates a principle of adjectival semantics: size is relative. There's no contradiction in saying that a "tiny bird" is the same size as a "giant ant." A tiny dinosaur could be far bigger than either, and a giant virus far smaller.

Mythical taxonomy

From Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature, some interesting taxonomic names with their roots in classical mythology: 

• Achelousaurus horneri Sampson, 1995 (ceratopsian dinosaur). This hornless ceratopsian evolved from horned ancestors. It was named for Achelous, a Greek river god whose horn was broken in a battle with Heracles. The species name (for paleontologist Jack Horner) replaces the lost horn. [J. Vert. Paleo. 15(4)]

• Thermarces cerberus Rosenblatt and Cohen, 1986 (Eelpout fish) from the Galapagos rift vents. Cerberus was the three-headed dog that guarded the gates of Hades.

• Cyclops (copepod) with a single median eye.

• Daedalosaurus Carroll, 1978 (Late Permian gliding reptile from Madagascar) and Icarosaurus Colbert, 1970 (Upper Triassic gliding reptile from New Jersey), after Daedalus and Icarus.

• Damocles Lund, 1986 (Carboniferous shark) The males had an elaborate projection from the back that ended poised over its head.

• Gorgonocephalus medusae (basket star) The basket star looks like a mass of serpents. Medusa was the most famous of the Gorgons, which had serpents for hair.

• Pegasus Linnaeus, 1758 (seamoth fish)

• Amoeba proteus (amoeba), so named because Proteus had the ability to change form.

• Sisyphus Latreille, 1807 (dung beetle) Named after a king condemned in Hades to roll an immense boulder uphill, only to have it inevitably break free and roll down again, this beetle makes and rolls large balls of dung with greater success.

• Talos Zanno et al., 2011 (birdlike theropod dinosaur) Named for a winged bronze giant of Greek mythology, which could run extremely fast and which succumbed to an ankle wound. The name is also a pun on "talon".

Another particularly lovely name in this vein belongs to Prodryas persephone, a fossil butterfly whose species name refers to the queen of the underworld. (The naturalist who named Prodryas gave similarly allusive names to two other fossil butterflies: Lithopsyche styx and Jupiteria charon.)

Parroting a dead language

There’s a story that in 1799 the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was exploring the Orinoco and Amazon rivers and documenting the languages and cultures of the tribes he encountered there. While spending time with one tribe of Carib people, he asked them about their neighbours and rivals, the Maypure, who he was keen to visit. He was told that the Maypure had all been killed recently by the Carib tribe he was visiting, however they did have a couple of the Maypure’s pet parrots who spoke some of their language. Von Humboldt took the parrots back to Europe and transcribed their words – the only record we have of the Maypure language, which is also written Maypure, Maipure, Maypore or Maypore’. There seems to be some doubt whether this story is true: there is no mention of the parrots in von Humboldt’s meticulous journals, but there are phonetic transcriptions of the Maypure words he heard on his travels.

An interesting anecdote from the Omniglot blog. 

Infusorial Animalcules

Plate from Pritchard's 'Infusorial Animalcules' 1852 showing illustrations of freshwater microscopic organisms.

"Feathers of Humming Bird, Brittle Star Fish, Fossil Tooth of Shark"

These slides have cover slips of thin glass, which was very expensive and difficult to produce before the 1840s—early mounters more often used sheets of mica, which was far from transparent. The use of Canada balsam sap (which preserves structures and eliminates air and water from samples) as a mounting medium also vastly improved the view.

From a SEED Magazine slideshow of Victorian microscope slides. Those shown above are from the collection of Howard Lynk, who has many more; the arranged slides of diatoms and spicules are quite lovely.

Flowery nest

This is the flower-petal nest of Osmia avoseta, a Turkish solitary bee. It is about half an inch long, and holds a single egg; under the petals is a thin layer of mud.

Further information and more pictures at NPR.

Encylopedic eggs

This illustration (featuring the eggs of birds and insects, as well as the ornate egg cases of sharks) is from the Grand Larousse encyclopédique. The artist, Adolphe Millot, also illustrated algae, butterflies, feathers, vegetables, and fungi for that same encyclopedia. 

Nest of shells

Photo by Sharon Beals of a Caspian Tern nest.

Via Environmental Graffiti, which has more of Beals' beautiful bird-nest photos.

Branchinecta

More crustacean illustrations at BibliOdyssey. 

Two sunfish

Juvenile

Skeleton of adult