Clik here to view.
Sunday Spinelessness – The origin and extinction of species
I don’t use these pages to write about my own work very much, partly because it’s not yet published and partly because I write about that all day as it is. The shortest answer I can provide to the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sunday Spinelessness – Return of the spineless
It seems all the cool bug bloggers have escaped to the tropics just at the time I’ve got back to more temperate climes. I spent a couple of weeks in Vanuatu over the Christmas and New Year break and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sunday Spinelessness – Incertae sedis
I was going to start this post by saying taxonomy has a language of its own, but that’s not really true. Taxonomy just has a whole lot of Latin. When I’ve given talks in schools, I’ve almost always...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sunday Spinelessness – How chitons are tougher than stone
No time to say anything meaningful today, so here’s a pretty picture of a green chiton (Chiton glaucus) Of course, I wouldn’t be a self-respecting invertebrate evangelist if I didn’t try an convince...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sunday Spinelessness – They’re alive!
It would take the most dedicated reader of The Atavism to remember the empty snail shell I wrote about last year. I’ll admit even I’d mainly forgotten about myself, but this weekend I went on a little...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sunday Spinelessness – The other mollusc shell
Here’s a really cool animal, a female argonaut (sometimes called a paper nautilus): It may not be immediately obvious from the photo, but argonauts are octopuses. Strange octopuses, because the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sunday Spinelessness – Cuttlefish in drag deceive their rivals
One awesome mollusc deserves another, so let’s follow up last weeks octopus post with one on that group’s close relatives the cuttlefish. Cuttlefish are relatively small (the largest grow to 50cm)...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sunday Spinelessness – New Zealand microsnails
When I tell people I study snails for a living I get one of two replies. There’s either some version of the “joke” that goes “that must be slow-going” or “sounds action packed”, or there’s “oh, you...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sunday Spinelessness – Hairy snails
Here’s another of these tiny native snails I talked about last week. Aeschrodomus stipulatus: Not the best photo I’ll admit, but it records enough detail to see the two things that set Aeschrodomus...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sunday Spinelessness – How snails conquered the land (again and again)
Christie Willcox wrote a nice article this week on how one small group of organisms called “vertebrates” first evolved to live on land. Since you are a vertebrate who lives on land, you should...
View Article