Newt Relaxing Underwater
This is my new favorite picture of an underwater subject.
(Marin, California - 5/2013)
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919)
Tubulariae, Plate ot ‘Kunstformender Natur’ (Art Forms of Nature), 1904
(via scientificillustration)
French postcard c. 1927
To get ready for Early Life Weekend, I took a trip up to the Royal Ontario Museum’s palaeontology department and hung out with Dave Rudkin.
DAVE RUDKIN
Dave Rudkin is the Assistant Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology at the ROM and a truly great guy. Dave’s been busy preparing for the Gallery of Early Life, a permanent gallery opening in 2014, but he still found time to show me around the invertebrate palaeontology collections.
What I like most about Dave is that he always has time to support children’s programming, whether it’s to lend a few objects for a weekend, or just chat about palaeontology. His energy is infectious and he loves trilobites SO MUCH.
VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY
As all y’all know, I LOVE dinosaurs, and have spent a ton of time up in vertebrate palaeontology collection (of which you can see a few photos of here), but I’ve have had merely a glimpse of the workings of the invertebrate side.
This photo set features all sorts of animals from BEFORE the dinosaurs, the time when life first evolved on Earth. The ROM is a world leader in research on first life, specifically from the Burgess Shale site, so we have an absolutely PACKED collections room full of prehistoric treasures.
(via dendroica)
Beautiful Little Tea Cups
(anyone know who makes these? I would very much like one O__O )Franz Porcelain collection http://www.franzcollection.com/main.phpOh! My mom got the hummingbird one as a Christmas present for Brett’s grandma last year!
(via invocationtobegin)
Photo of the Day: Jackals in the Kalahari in South Africa
Photo by: Dale Morris (South Africa); Kalahari, South Africa
"Even as Apple became the nation’s most profitable technology company, it avoided billions in taxes in the United States and around the world through a web of subsidiaries so complex it spanned continents and went beyond anything most experts had ever seen, Congressional investigators disclosed on Monday…. Congressional investigators found that some of Apple’s subsidiaries had no employees and were largely run by top officials from the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. But by officially locating them in places like Ireland, Apple was able to, in effect, make them stateless — exempt from taxes, record-keeping laws and the need for the subsidiaries to even file tax returns anywhere in the world…. While Apple’s strategy is unusual in its scope and effectiveness, it underscores how riddled with loopholes the American corporate tax code has become, critics say. At the same time, it shows how difficult it will be for Washington to overhaul the tax system. Over all, Apple’s tax avoidance efforts shifted at least $74 billion from the reach of the Internal Revenue Service between 2009 and 2012, the investigators said. That cash remains offshore, but Apple, which paid more than $6 billion in taxes in the United States last year on its American operations, could still have to pay federal taxes on it if the company were to return the money to its coffers in the United States."
— Apple’s Web of Tax Shelters Saved It Billions, Panel Finds - NYTimes.com (via dendroica)
(via dendroica)
