Photograph by James Wood.
Photography contest, Honorable Mention.
Tasmanipatus barretti – giant velvet worm found in a rotting log in northeast Tasmania. This species is restricted to a range of 600 km2 in the northeast corner of the state and is listed as rare under Tasmanian state legislation.
We have been going through our archives to find excellent contest entries that have not so far been posted. We begin with this picture, which dates from the first photography contest in 2009. Our apologies to the photographers, but we had an embarrassment of riches the first few years.
Magnificent! Is it a young specimen?
But, but, but, there are no intermediate forms! Especially none that are still alive! If there are arthropods, why are there still onychophorans? :)
And yet another critter that’s of the devil from you Pandas! Well, what else can we expect from atheist communist liberal satanists? Just look at those horns!
Shades of Hallucigenia sp. and the Burgess Shale!
Jeez. What a difference a little “h” makes.
Wait, giant velvet worm? How small are the regular ones?
The thing is, those fingers are enormous.
Oh, those fingers belong to the designer? :p
No, a park ranger with gigantism and having eaten too many salty snacks.
Do they have claws on the feet like the ancient versions and tardigrades?
If you look close at the picture, you can see the claws.
Did the Ark have to make an extended world tour to put all those “restricted range” animals in the right places? :)
Bathroom Wall please.
I don’t see how the blind cave fish made it back home without assistance
Maybe they had help from some seeing-eye dogfish?
I’m also wondering how the 2 barnacles made it down Mount Ararat.
And God spoke to Noah, “I say unto you, there will come those who seek to challenge your story with facts. So take up all the wooden planks from the ark - yes, even the barnacle-covered planks - and scatter them to the four coners of the earth, so that the doubters may never discover that your trial was truly about a family and its livestock surviving a local flood.”
I like these little critters (See Astronomy Picture of the Day for March 6, 2013). Just the physics of extremophiles is really interesting all by itself.
It is really amazing that velvet worms have enough intelligence to hunt in packs and establish a social structure.
I don’t know why, but I find this fellow to be almost charmingly cute. There’s something almost Seussian about it.
The tardigrade on APOD is also quite unreal. That proboscis *must* have been designed! ;-)
If the were bigger, they would be horrifying scifi monsters.
The Night of the Lepus Velvet Worms?
Seriously, have you looked up their feeding behavior?
i.e., sniffing out preferred prey, then squirting anesthetizing goo willy-nilly to literally cement their victim in their tracts, then following the goo trail to the immobilized victim so it can cut through the cuticle with its sharp and powerful mandibles and regurgitate digestive enzymes into the body, whereupon it then slurps out the predigested body-contents at its leisure?
For example, peripatus versus cockroach
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