This exotic-looking annelid worm was actually found off the Scottish coast at St Andrews, and appears in the 1910 Monograph of the British Marine Annelids. Also known as the King Ragworm, this regal creature can grow up to 1.2 metres (4 feet) long! This species was also the first to be shown to use chemical…
Tag: marine biology
A fluffy mammal? A furry tail? Believe it or not, this is a mollusc!
Well, this certainly isn’t the image that springs to mind when you think of molluscs – but the more recognisable snails, oysters and octopus only represent three out of the eight living groups. This beautiful creature is a solenogastre, one of the two vermiform (worm-like) molluscan groups. Solenogastres are found in oceans across the world, from…
April fool! This ‘snail shell’ isn’t quite what it seems…
When is a snail not a snail? What if it’s something totally, completely different? This mollusc-like shell was described as a new species of trochid in 1903, but in fact it comes from an entire different phylum (one of the highest levels of distinction between animals). Any ideas what it might be instead? … It’s an anemone!…
Ernst Haeckel: Happy birthday to one of the greatest scientific illustrators
To continue with another biological birthday, today would have been Ernst Haeckel’s 182nd celebration. Haeckel is undoubtedly one of the most talented and influential illustrators in the history of biology, and produced beautiful images for many zoological and botanical works of great importance including ‘The Art Forms of Nature’. This drawing, of the Peromedusae (jellyfish) demonstrates…
Happy #DarwinDay! Celebrating Charles’s 207th birthday with his favourite barnacles
These bright and beautiful barnacle illustrations are from a monograph of Darwin’s from 1851, Living Cirripedia. Barnacles, along with fancy pigeons, were an extremely important group to Darwin’s work, and he spent eight years studying them in minute detail and reclassifying the entire group. His studies, which interrupted to some extent his writing of On the Origin of…
Anatomy To You 