Scientific Illustration

rhamphotheca:

The Ocean Through Time:  Mississippian Marine Habitat

(359 - 318 million years ago)

Crinoids (echinoderms related to sea stars and sea urchins) dominate the Paleozoic shallow water habitat in this illustration. They evolved a variety of stalk heights, which enabled them to capture food at different levels above the sea floor. The base of their stalks was modified to anchor the animal securely in the soft sediment.

Crinoids were relative skyscrapers in the community, sometimes towering up to two meters (6.5 feet). Lacy bryozoans occupied a lower level. Below them, huge numbers of brachiopods monopolized the muddy bottom. Sharks cruised above these crinoid forests, while smaller bony fishes weaved among the crinoid stalks.

(CREDIT: Smithsonian Institution)

(via: Smithsonian Ocean Portal)

witchcraftdestroysminds:

early earth

hallucigenesis:

flasd

Atlas Cosmobiographique - Petur Beron, 1859

(via inkmaps)

rhamphotheca:

Earth’s Core - the Enigma 1,800 Miles Below Us

by Natalie Angier

Geologists have long known thatEarth’s core, some 1,800 miles beneath our feet, is a dense, chemically doped ball of iron roughly the size of Mars and every bit as alien. It’s a place where pressures bear down with the weight of 3.5 million atmospheres, like 3.5 million skies falling at once on your head, and where temperatures reach 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit — as hot as the surface of the Sun. It’s a place where the term “ironclad agreement” has no meaning, since iron can’t even agree with itself on what form to take. It’s a fluid, it’s a solid, it’s twisting and spiraling like liquid confetti.

Researchers have also known that Earth’s inner Martian makes its outer portions look and feel like home. The core’s heat helps animate the giant jigsaw puzzle of tectonic plates floating far above it, to build up mountains and gouge out seabeds. At the same time, the jostling of core iron generates Earth’ magnetic field, which blocks dangerous cosmic radiation, guides terrestrial wanderers and brightens northern skies with scarves of auroral lights.

Now it turns out that existing models of the core, for all their drama, may not be dramatic enough. Reporting recently in the journal Nature, Dario Alfè of University College London and his colleagues presented evidence that iron in the outer layers of the core is frittering away heat through the wasteful process called conduction at two to three times the rate of previous estimates…

(read more: NY Times)         (image: Bruce Buffett, UC Berkeley)

Feathered Reptile by Nigel Hawtin on Flickr.

joewardillustration:

Insects, 2012.

Two A3 pages from my sketchbook. Thought it’d be much simpler just to show them like this than edit and edit and edit. They take too long to do. 

rhamphotheca:

Diffuse gas—called plasma—flows outward from the sun as the “solar wind” and carries with it solar magnetic field lines that become entangled with the Earth’s own magnetic field lines. Location of “holes” were detected in indicated pink layers, near Earth… (read more: PhysOrg)

(Image: NASA)

elegantbuffalo:

Lystrosaurus murrayi—one of the many fossils that supports the Theory of Continental Drift/Plate Tectonics.

Alfred Wegner first proposed this idea by noting that the rock sequences in South America, Africa, India, and Australia are almost identical, and thereby must contain similar fossils.

“Illustrating The Solar-Lunar Tides” from the book Sea and Land by J. W. Buel in the late 1880’s.

Thanks for the submission!

biomedicalephemera:

Pink Beryl and Emerald Crystals

Emerald is actually a member of the beryl family of gemstones (including aquamarine, heliodor, red beryl, and others), but with a higher number of impurities (known as inclusions), and colored various shades of green by trace amounts of chromium.

While dozens of questionable cures and wards for the plague are known, the royalty of both Europe and Byzantium believed that crushed emerald was the surest ward, and would save them from any plague-related death. This belief went so far as to lead the apothecaries and physicians of sixteenth-century England to release a declaration stating that the inefficacy of gems in both curing and warding the plague was due to improper identification and preparation of gems prescribed, not because the “cure” was simply a ploy on the nobility’s belief that the more expensive something was, the better it was.

A Book of Precious Stones. Julius Wodiska, 1909.