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Old Lime Kiln dressed in Lichen

Pen y Feidiog, Nr Trawsfynydd, Eryri, Cymru, UK

The first picture is an ancient standing stone that is slowly being reclaimed by the moor. The lime kiln seems to be a long way from any signs of old dwelling places, so I find it a bit of a mystery. Perhaps the lime was needed by whoever farmed the area to improve the soil. When I first saw it I thought it was an ancient burial mound so I was a little disappointed when I found out about it being a lime kiln, so much less romantic. Still, it’s a magical place, and the kiln is fascinating.

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Sarah Sze Implants a Fragmented Installation of Individual Mirrors in a Lush Hudson Valley Landscape

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Art by Seren (@ieafy)

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Art by CuteSkitty

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'Saved by Wolf Angel' by Ten Yetman (@tenyetman)

acrylic and ink on canvas, 9" x 12"

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fantasy art by Bellator Sanguine

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Art by Michael Sowa

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Chalicotheriidae by Mario Lanzas

Chalicotheriidae is an extinct family of herbivorous, odd-toed ungulate (perissodactyl) mammals that lived in North America, Eurasia, and Africa from the Middle Eocene to the Early Pleistocene. They are often called chalicotheres, a term which is also applied to the broader grouping of Chalicotherioidea.  They are noted for their unusual morphology compared to other ungulates, such as their clawed forelimbs. Members of the subfamily Chalicotheriinae developed elongate gorilla-like forelimbs that are thought to have been used to grasp vegetation. They are thought to have been browsers on foliage as well as possibly bark and fruit... (via: Wikipedia)

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Alexander Goebel

MGM Paris

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Gold-banded Forester (Euphaedra n. neophron), family Nymphalidae, Kosi Bay, Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa

photograph by Lourens Erasmus

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The remote locale that shielded plants during Earth’s biggest mass extinction

About 252 million years ago, 80 to 90 percent of life on Earth was wiped out. In the Turpan-Hami Basin, life persisted and bounced back faster.

During a cataclysmic mass extinction event, there are typically not many places to hide. However, a region of the mountainous Turpan-Hami Basin in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in Western China may have been an oasis for some living organisms during the planet’s largest mass extinction.  The spot may have served as a refugium–or life oasis–for terrestrial plants during the end-Permian mass extinction, when 80 to 90 percent of life on Earth was wiped out about 252 million years ago.  These new findings are detailed in a study published March 12 in the journal Science Advances and challenges some of the views that land-based ecosystems saw the same major losses as marine environments during this incredibly turbulent time in our planet’s natural history...

Read more: https://www.popsci.com/science/great-dying-plants-china

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Allosaurus illustration by Fred Wierum

We live closer in time to Tyrannosaurus (72.7 to 66 million years ago) than, T. rex did to the Allosaurus (155 to 145 million years ago).

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A genome-based phylogeny for Mollusca is concordant with fossils and morphology

Abstract

Extreme morphological disparity within Mollusca has long confounded efforts to reconstruct a stable backbone phylogeny for the phylum. Familiar molluscan groups—gastropods, bivalves, and cephalopods—each represent a diverse radiation with myriad morphological, ecological, and behavioral adaptations. The phylum further encompasses many more unfamiliar experiments in animal body-plan evolution. In this work, we reconstructed the phylogeny for living Mollusca on the basis of metazoan BUSCO (Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs) genes extracted from 77 (13 new) genomes, including multiple members of all eight classes with two high-quality genome assemblies for monoplacophorans. Our analyses confirm a phylogeny proposed from morphology and show widespread genomic variation. The flexibility of the molluscan genome likely explains both historic challenges with their genomes and their evolutionary success.

Read the paper here:

A genome-based phylogeny for Mollusca is concordant with fossils and morphology | Science