Goodnight To Glass Animals ONLY

PIPER (2016) dir. Alan Barillaro

forest aesthetic

One of these things is not like the others!

This handsome skull belongs to an iguana.

These all belong to water monitors.

And this one belongs to a tegu.

The tegu’s skull is missing a hole!

Those little openings on the top of the monitors’ heads and the iguana’s is where the pineal eye is located. The pineal eye can distinguish between light and dark, and helps with thermoregulation. But tegus don’t have it! They lost their pineal eye sometime during the course of their evolution- which is evidence of how even though they might look a bit like monitors, they really aren’t that closely related!

emo about lichens again

Hey so what the FUUUUUUCK happened in this beetle’s evolution??? For that matter why didn’t I know about these if they’re a “common wood-boring pest???”

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep27364 Under “normal” circumstances, they don’t form adults and the larva simply clones new larvae that eat their way out of the “mother larva.” If exposed to extreme heat, they’ll pupate and turn into little beetles like their ancestors did, and the little beetles go through a whole elaborate courtship period where the females fight with each other over territory and try to mount males or each other (apparently the first time same-sex coupling was observed in a beetle), with both sexes having unique little dances to communicate with each other. If I’m reading correctly the male has a mating display while the female has like a little “rejection dance” I think? And then it doesn’t matter because all adults are sterile so the population just dies off.

I’m not a songbird. I’m a screm bird!

After ten years and probably over a hundred individual skulls, I finally did it. I finally found one.

I found a white-tailed deer with a vestigial canine tooth

Floral Snake Art Prints by starrypaige

Black cats are beautiful