Oxalis elegans.

stilllifequickheart:

Pierre-Joseph Redoute

Tulip

1802-16

(via scientificillustration)

scientificillustration:

Columbia Lily or Tiger Lily -Lilium columbianum Leichtlin

Elwes, H.J., Fitch, W.H., A monograph of the genus Lilium , t. 35 (1880) [W.H. Fitch]

biocanvas:

Volvox aureus, a type of freshwater green algae, with daughter colonies.

Image by Gerd Günther.

biocanvas:

A fungal infection (bright green) of an Arabidopsis (a plant related to cabbage and mustard) root.

Image by Kirk Czymmek, University of Delaware.

biocanvas:

A crosscut from the leaf of a cedar tree, Cedrus atlantica.

Image by Christian Gautier.

biocanvas:

A 1300-times magnified view of the anther of Convallaria majalis, lily of the valley. Pollen grains are in green.

Image by Albert Tousson, University of Alabama at Birmingham.

ulaulaman:

The forest from the past.
In the image there is the reconstruction of a 300-million-year old forest discovered by a team of archeologists in Mongolia, China.
The research was published on PNAS with a open access article, Permian vegetational Pompeii from Inner Mongolia and its implications for landscape paleoecology and paleobiogeography of Cathaysia by Jun Wang, Hermann W. Pfefferkornb, Yi Zhang, Zhuo Feng

Plant communities of the geologic past can be reconstructed with high fidelity only if they were preserved in place in an instant in time. Here we report such a flora from an early Permian (ca. 298 Ma) ash-fall tuff in Inner Mongolia, a time interval and area where such information is filling a large gap of knowledge. About 1,000 m² of forest growing on peat could be reconstructed based on the actual location of individual plants. Tree ferns formed a lower canopy and either Cordaites, a coniferophyte, or Sigillaria, a lycopsid, were present as taller trees. Noeggerathiales, an enigmatic and extinct spore-bearing plant group of small trees, is represented by three species that have been found as nearly complete specimens and are presented in reconstructions in their plant community. Landscape heterogenity is apparent, including one site where Noeggerathiales are dominant. This peat-forming flora is also taxonomically distinct from those growing on clastic soils in the same area and during the same time interval. This Permian flora demonstrates both similarities and differences to floras of the same age in Europe and North America and confirms the distinct character of the Cathaysian floral realm. Therefore, this flora will serve as a baseline for the study of other fossil floras in East Asia and the early Permian globally that will be needed for a better understanding of paleoclimate evolution through time.

In official press releasePfefferkornb says:

It’s marvelously preserved. We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That’s really exciting.

And about the likenesses with Pompei:

It’s like Pompeii: Pompeii gives us deep insight into Roman culture, but it doesn’t say anything about Roman history in and of itself. But on the other hand, it elucidates the time before and the time after. This finding is similar. It’s a time capsule and therefore it allows us now to interpret what happened before or after much better.

You can see the images of the findings on gizmodo.

(via scientificillustration)

Indigenous North American Ethnobotany
A public lecture series  -  three Wednesdays this March at 3:30, in B302 Birge Hall

March 14: Nancy Turner
(University of Victoria) Adam’s Gardens: Biodiversity and Traditional Food Production of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America

March 21: Jane Mt. Pleasant
(Cornell University) Reframing North American Indigenous Agriculture: It’s the Agronomy, Stupid!

March 28: Linda Different Cloud-Jones
(Sitting Bull College & Montana State University) Restoring Lands, Restoring People: Culturally Important Plants and the Lakota Nation.

This series is organized by the Laboratory of Ethnobotany, Evolution and Conservation of Crop Plants and Wild Relatives to promote interactions of faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and students interested in ethnobotany. In addition, the series is meant to provide a new venue for interdisciplinary exchanges of ideas and opportunities for intra-campus collaborations. There will be additional events and opportunities to meet the speakers during the 3-day stay of each invited speaker. For more information, please contact Dr. Eve Emshwiller at emshwiller@wisc.edu.

Sponsors include: Botany Department  -  Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute (WISELI)  -  University Lectures Committee  -  American Indian Studies (AIS)  -  Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS)  -  Agroecology MSc Program  Anthropology Department  -  Center for Culture, History and Enviroment (CHE)  -  UW-Madison chapter of SACNAS

looks like Oxalis oregana.

(via garden-artistry)

universe-of-waves:

(via infinity-imagined)

scipsy:

The Scale of the Universe 2

Wow.

scipsy:

15 Evolutionary Gems: A resource from Nature for those wishing to spread awareness of evidence for evolution by natural selection.

scipsy:

Pinus monophylla leaf (via sols.unlv.edu)

crownedrose:

jtotheizzoe:

cetacean34:

Ray Troll stratigraphy/geologic time. I’m printing this out and hanging it above my desk. 

Know your geologic history.

And don’t put a nautilus in the back of your pickup truck. That is not how we treat nice fossils.

Actually, there’s a lot wrong with this chart. I see it’s written as the K-T boundary instead of the K-Pg, though I’m still getting used to the change myself. But when it comes to periods and epochs, some are there, and some are not. Here are the issues:

Where’s the Paleogene period on this chart? After the Cretaceous period, it jumps right to the Paleocene, which is the first epoch (of three - followed by the Eocene and the Oliogcene) in the Paleogene period. The Paleogene period is in the Cenozoic era, so why is it missing on this chart?

If you include epochs, you must include what period they reside under, otherwise this chart now makes it out to be that the Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Piestocene, and Holocene are all periods when they are in fact epochs.

The other period is missing here that resides in the Cenozoic era as well, the Neogene. The Neogene had two epochs: the Miocene, and Pliocene, which are seen above.

For the Piestocene and Holocene epochs, they reside in the Quaternary period. Yes, all these epochs are within the Cenozoic era, but again, you must include their periods as well, and for the Mesozoic, you should include their epochs, etc. This chart would be confusing to one who does not know the divisions.

This same issue is also occurring at the bottom of the chart. The Palaeozoic era includes all those listed, but instead of having the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian subperiods listed, why wouldn’t one just put the Carboniferious period instead? I know some just use the M and P subperiods, but I prefer the Carboniferious!

To sum it up: epochs and periods are not the same, and even if many of us know our geological time charts, there are many people who would most likely confuse the terms because of this chart’s layout. If you’re still unsure of what I meant by all of what’s stated above, check out this geologic time scale on Wikipedia, which is a more accurate and easier to understand chart.

(via historiantinanatural)