Headless Gibbon

Polar Bear Cub

Today's find: an exquisite 3 day old polar bear cub in a jar.

Floating bells of crystal

Survival of the cutest

The feather-footed jerboa wins the prize for the cutest specimen in the Natural History Collections

The Sunlike Eye

Goethe maintained that even the eye we use to observe the world 'owes its existence to the light. Out of indifferent animal organs the light produces an organ corresponding to itself; and so the eye is formed by this light for the light so that the inner light may meet the outer...If the eye were not sunlike how could we perceive the light?'

blind worm

Blind Worm

Slow Worm

Looks like a piece of intestine. Not a snake, I am told, but a limbless lizard. Long-lived, they say. Maybe 30 years. A single slow patient pink fingertip pushing and feeling a way into the dark belly of the ground, nosing for slugs and worms.

Well, that's good enough advice as I start out, not knowing the way.

Hatching

In Edinburgh University's old teaching collection of Systematic Zoology something is hatching. I think it might have something to do with Goethe but I'm not sure yet. He said 'Every act of looking turns into observation, every act of observation into the making of associations; thus it is evident that we theorize every time we look carefully at the world'. So there is no innocent eye.