#sciart Who loves some cool ammonite art??

So, just got back from Japan and busy playing catchup and recovering from jet lag... so in the meantime, here's some cool ammonite art to go along with the #sciart hashtag currently producing such neat things on Twitter!

Paleoecology 19th Century style!

A wonderful piece by Ieuan Edwards!

with a cool "making of" pic..

This one is awesome!

Paris! The city of lights? Or the city of the Octopus?

October 26, 2013. UPDATED with more! 

PARIS! I've just arrived and hard at work with my colleagues at the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle!  But this week has been crazy. Wi-fi down, taking care of last minute projects and so forth on top of travel and jet lag.

So this week the blog is about a curious set of street art I've seen. OCTOPUSES all around Paris! 

These are often painted or posted surreptitiously around Paris in strange corners and rarely travelled nooks around the city. Based on the arm length and overall appearance they appear to most closely resemble the "dumbo" octopus -something like Grimpateuthis or Opisthoteuthis but I'm pretty sure the artist has mainly taken the image from his own imagination...

                           

This one actually bears a striking resemblance

here is an OUTSTANDING page with MANY others! 

and yet even MORE with pop culture characters

These are apparently done by a street artist called Gz' Up and most of these octopuses are plywood glued high on street corners.  Go here to read more about him and to see more of these

Check out Gz'Up's Flickr stream showing his MANY octopus designs! 

They all have the same basic shape but vary by character....  The following I have seen...

These I found on Flickr and elsewhere...  

KRUSTY! 

image by meuh1246

The old Japanese superhero Spectreman! 

Image by meuh1246

Cyclops from the X-Men

Image by meuh 1246

King cyclopopod! 

and extra bonus! GIANT CEPHALOPOD mounted on a Paris building wall!

Some Halloween fun next week!

The Sea Urchin Skeleton as Art! Natural and Enhanced!

There is a natural and wonderful symmetry to many natural objects and echinoderms have always had a certain appeal to folks with artistic natures. Their skeletons are pentameral and often have no shortage of patterns and visually interesting processes. Go here to seem my SEM odyssey of the urchin test!

Sea urchins are no exception to this-and everyone I know who has ever found an intact sea urchin (or sand dollar) test on the beach is always delighted. A "test" is the name of a sea urchin skeleton. They don't have "shells".

Here's a nice example of a cidaroid sea urchin test. The spines attach to the "knobs" (called bosses) that are present on its surface.

sea urchin test by Rainy City

Today, I thought I would present some of the many delightful examples that many of these tests have found their way into the creative processes of the wonderful artists on the Internet!  Then compare below with some examples of sea urchin tests with their own innate artful patterns!

Cidaroid Urchins a la Warhol! by Calypso985

A stunning underlit cidaroid urchin test by Mark Bolles

A neat repeating Urchin Spiral by Jeff Kreulan 

"Red Tide" part of an art exhibit featuring urchins with a distinctive presentation. Pic by Selene Vomer

"Algae Bloom"   Image also by Selene Vomer. Chicken skeleton over urchin skeleton. Hm?

"Phosphorflock" Pic by Selene Vomer. I think its supposed to represent some kind of egg?

Here it is illuminated...

Image by tiboutoo

Illuminating or highlighting urchin tests with lights, lasers, fluorescence is a common theme...

An illuminated urchin by gmenut

One lit up with fluorescent lighting... "Voodoo Moon" by Sea Moon

"Sea Urchin Laser Fluorescence" by Bob Fosbury

And there's this stop motion classic "Javelin" by Ian McAlpin


Natural Beauty  In contrast, here's some tests in their natural glory...

a cidaroid test by gripspix1

Another urchin test. Image by "fontplaydotcom"

The test of Coelopleurus exquisitus, a recently discovered New Caledonian sea urchin species, described by my colleague Simon Coppard, who found tests of this species on Ebay a few years ago!

Amazingly, the patterns? ARE NATURALLY OCCURRING. Those are on the test under the spines and all of the other structures and skin on the surface! They don't disappear after the animal has died. They are ingrained in the mineral structure of the test.

Both images below are by Simon Coppard

and we didn't even get started on Irregular urchins like Clypeaster and the other Sand Dollars..

A spotlight on Echinoderm Art

Things got a bit busy this week  and I've been discovering the wonders of the natural history side of DeviantArt!

MANY creative and wonderful artists out there and I thought it would be cool to showcase some of the notable ones, especially the ones that can be compared against the "originals"

Frankly, I'm pretty impressed. At one time, a LOT of these animals were known only to a handful of specialists in the world. And NOW?People make them into art!! That's amazing!

Here's a few...

Enypniastes! The deep-sea Swimming Sea cucumber! I blogged about these HERE.

Enypniastes eximia by *NocturnalSea on deviantART

Swimming Sea Cucumber Enypniastes eximia by ~JadaFitch on deviantART

Swimming Sea Cucumber by ~veeohlay on deviantART

Here are some video of the original inspiration!

SEA PIGS! The sea cucumber called Scotoplanes! I wrote a bit on this HERE.

OINK!

Sea Pig by ~YavKementari on deviantART

and holiday classics!

Yeti Crab Santa by *NocturnalSea on href="http://www.deviantart.com">deviantART

An interesting one with a Chinese art theme

Sea Pig by ~ToonSkribblez on deviantART

A digital sea pig

cute as a sea pig by ~apostlebird on deviantART

Here's a link to a neat one called "Sea Pig Nouveau" that sadly, was not embeddable..but click here.

and of course, here's the original..

What follows here are some PALEOZOIC fossils, with added colors and "reconstructed" onto a Paleozoic sea bottom as if they were alive...
I try to compare some of these with actual fossils...

Ophiocistioids! Strange Paleozoic forms! I wrote about these only awhile ago HERE.

Volchovia species by =avancna on deviantART

Sollasina and Eucladia by =avancna on deviantART

Here is an actual fossil of the ophiocistioid Eucladia from Yale's collection

Cystoid echinoderms from the Paleozoic!  I'll blog more about the various Paleozoic echinoderms some day, but there's easily as many extinct echinoderm fossil groups (most of them with stems) as living groups.   This image has a nice assortment of them from the Ordovician of New York..

Glyptocystites multiporus by =avancna on deviantART

Here are the three primary critters for comparison! The light olive one in the upper right corner, wrapped around the bryozoans is called Cupulocrinus jewetti

Image by Paleoportal. Photo by Joe Koniecki

The artist indicates the blue individual as the cystoid Pleurocystites squamosus 

Image from Paleoportal. Photo by Joe Koniecki

Here's another.. the brown one with all the unusual spines? tentacles along the sides? Is identified as Glyptocystites multiporus. Here's a fossil from the Ordovician in Ontario for comparison

Image from Paleoportal. Photo by Joe Koniecki

Off-topic! Deep-Sea Octopus street art? Or Herald of the World's Twilight in Pink?

Caught this funky spray painted art on the streets of Paris...
Is it the flapjack octopus Opisthoteuthis? (Grimpoteuthis?)


Futurama character Zoidberg?
A pink crocheted Cthulhu?? (who lies dreaming in his house at the bottom of the sea..)
You decide.(thanks to Allison G, John W., and Ken V. for their suggestions-even if I didn't use all of them)

Cephalopod Awareness Days! Echinoblog Off Topic!

This week- a little diversion as I have the pleasure of honoring our Oh-so-lovable tentacled invertebrate bretheren the Cephalopods (squids, octopuses, cuttlefishes, nautilus, vampire squids, and ammonites) as "Cephalopod Awareness Days" takes place from Oct 8 to the 12th!

Now, ANYONE could just do a blog about cephalopods and frankly, there are several good ones (see the sidebar) that focus entirely on cephalopods. So, what odd or unique thing can the Echinoblog bring to the table?

Well, I DID do that story on an interesting sea star, Plazaster borealis whose name in Japanese the Tako Hidoe, literally means "Octopus Starfish" (click here to see!).

(from Marine World Japan)

BUT as it turns out, I happen to know that a LOT of Japanese popular culture, including a lot of science fiction is inspired by marine animals...especially cephalopods!

These animals inspire a lot of toys and action figures in Japan, which in turn inspire a LOT of creative people to do some fun things.

So, a little break from echinoderms and actual biology..and a bit of a detour into art and pop culture this week!

You may recall that I did a post on Japanese echinoderm-themed monsters (called kaiju) a few years ago... (sadly the Starfish Hitler video seems to have been pulled)

But here is a creative fellow (from website Corey's Head) who has applied Photoshop to several Japanese monster toys (mostly about 6 to 9 inches tall) with cephalopod themes!! He has applied some scenic backgrounds from the Washington state area into..well... these cephalopod monster inspired masterpieces!

The monster Tagarl from the show Ultraman Taro. You can read about its "biology" here..

An attack by the 4-armed octopus themed GUYROS from the show UltraSeven!

The formidible monster cuttlefish GEZORA and yes, of course, there's a Wikipedia page on it!
and finally the weird tentacled VIRAS from the Gamera movie franchise. Look its history up here.
Here are some wacky images of something called Chibull seijin (seijin is Japanese for alien) also from the Japanese show UltraSeven.

Some artists work in the medium of a sculpted soft vinyl to produce these original ad colorful cephalopod figures/statues!

This one is called Tripus and is produced by an artist named Mark Nagata whose blog can be found here.

And here's an odd one from an old Japanese science fiction show called Barom-1. . Unfortunately, I'm not sure what its called other than "Ammonite Head Monster" .... but uh..yeah, that's pretty much what it is...

and if that wasn't enough? Go take a look at this New Zealand-TePapa Museum video of what must be one of the world's LARGEST ammonites! (a fossil cephalopod from the Mesozoic!)