Monday, January 18, 2010

Fossil Flowers and Op-Art Fish

The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture blog recently posted some of their curators' favorite acquisitions over the past year. Favorites included a collection of Washington spiders (35,000 of them!), an incredible op-art looking fish, called a Psychedelic Frogfish (which also made Time's top 10 as number 6: "The World's Weirdest Fish." Also on the Burke curators list (listed in Part 2) were a Brontothere skull, and my favorites (along with the fish) a 15 million-year-old fossil seastar from the Olympic National Park, and some 50 million-year old fossil flowers from British Columbia.

I was happy to see that they posted a photo of the cases containing the spider specimens rather than the actual arachnids, but I was not too happy to see the hyena skin (with a tag through its eye). To see the fish minus spider and dead hyena pics, check out the Time Magazine article--it shows quite a dramatic shot of the fish.