Diatoms: the tinker toys of the microbial world. MacGyver could build a bomb out of the components on this slide. A modern microscopic image of diatoms, artfully arranged. Image by Wipeter, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. Click for link.

There aren’t many things about the Victorian world I would have liked, but their impulse to combine nature and art is one thing I could get solidly behind. Don’t miss this slide show over at SEED Magazine highlighting the work of Victorian prepared slide makers. This was a time when the general public actually enjoyed scientific pursuits like looking at things under a microscope in their spare time, so much so that they could actually support an entire diatom art sweatshop industry. Seriously. It happened.

Enjoy!

The online version consists of 86 photographs with crisp captions that follow the history-of-life artistic tradition of the Rite of Spring from Fantasia (check out the amoeba!) and any number of other museum murals and books. It’s a pleasing sensory experience, something akin to a brain back rub, if such a thing is possible.

I have only a few quibbles; the Cretaceous seems to have been a particularly groovy era of Earth history based on its inexplicable 70’s-game-show musical interlude, and there are a few inaccuracies (i.e. the spacing of the pictures in the time line is SO not to scale; chlorophyll does not fuel all life). But these are minor and beside the point.

He has also created a live action version featuring music by Philip Glass and “images, dance[ed. note — I’m suddenly envisioning giant isopod be-costumed dancers prancing across the stage], film, and science.” The premiere will be June 10 in New York City, and will include as guest of honor one of my three science heroes — E. O. Wilson (love you E.O.! Wish I could be there to meet you!) — along with a slew of other stars and scientists including Alan Alda, Harrison Ford, and James Watson, the Watson half of Watson and Crick (the guys who along with Rosalind Franklin figured out the structure of DNA).

The online slide show does suffer a bit from the common problems of the genre laid out by Stephen Jay Gould in the preface to his Book of Life; first, the omission of “simple” creatures like microbes, invertebrates, and fungi from the show after vertebrates appear, with the attending implication that they stop evolving after their appearance.

On the contrary. Invertebrates, fungi (actually, fungi never even appear in the show except as lichens), microbes and ferns have all continued evolving and adapting. One diorama at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science featuring conifers from the late Paleozoic/early Mesozoic shows conifers with shockingly (to my eyes) broad leaves. Needles only evolved later.

The second problem is the implication that evolution is a predictable and inevitable march of increasing superiority resulting in the evolution of Homo sapiens, the be-all end-all. It’s hard to get around this problem, though, since it’s nice to highlight major novelties (and let’s face it, flowering plants, mammalian diversification, and humans were indeed major novelties) in chronological order, and humans did arrive very late on the scene.

Finally, there is the problem of time distortion, magnified in this case by the skewed presentation of the time line. For most of Earth’s history (probably the first 3 billion years anyway), life was simple and microbial. But we get only a handful of pictures devoted to that, and dozens of pictures devoted to the last 500 million years. It’d be a pretty boring slideshow if he didn’t present it this way (if for no other reason than we don’t have much information about what that early life looked like), but it’s a distortion nonetheless. Would it be so hard to make the timeline to scale, anyway?

Check out the slideshow first, but when you are done looking at it, check out the timeline. Choosing each image reveals extras including Lanting’s notes on the pictures and often some cool bonuses like video of the geyser or stromatolites. In spite of my (and Gould’s) quibbles, it’s a first rate production!

As always, I, and I’m sure he, hope you will draw inspiration from the beauty of life to help protect it.

Discovered thanks to Carl Zimmer at The Loom.

Take a look.

Awwwwwwww . . . . .  but as a female mammal, I must say Thank God the little darlings are born SANS horns. *Shudder*.

The breed is also called Egyptian longhorn, but before I even got to this detail in the article, I was struck by how closely these cattle resemble the cattle Egyptians actually depicted in and on their tombs:

Photo by Gérard Ducher, distributed under a Creative Commons attribution license. Click image for link.

The cow second from left looks a lot like Belle. This model is from an incredible collection found in the the Middle Egyptian tomb of a noble called Meketre who died ca. 2000 B.C. In his tomb in a secret room that tomb robbers missed were found intricate dollhouse-like models of soldiers marching, sailors rowing, brewers brewing, bakers baking, or Meketre himself counting his cattle. Meketre had all these models placed in his tomb so all these things could happen for him in the next world. Together, they form an intimate, detailed snapshot of daily life in ancient Egypt. If you’re ever at the Met in New York City, don’t miss their share of the collection.

Here’s the nobleman Sennedjem with Egyptian cattle as seen on his tomb wall:

The artisan Sennedjem plows heavenly fields on his tomb wall. Ca. reign of Seti I/Ramesses II, 1200s B.C.

I’ve always loved those splotchy cattle with the big horns I see in Egyptian art. It’s nice to know that even though the builders of the pyramids and their culture are long gone, their cattle, at least, live on.

And while we’re on the subject of animals in Egyptian art, I’ve also been struck by the contrast between the formal, stiff poses Egyptian artists used to depict humans, and the Audubon-esque naturalism with which they sometimes precociously depicted animals. They had a keen eye for detail, as you can see in this painting of geese made almost 5,000 years ago during the Old Kingdom.

Geese painted in the tomb of Nefermaat and his wife Atet during the reign of the triple-pyramid building Pharaoh (and Ladies' Man) Snefru, ca. 2600 B.C.

Just for the record, this panel of geese (not all are shown here) may be my favorite work of Egyptian art ever. Its simplicity, attention to detail, balance — and may I say grace? — are timeless. As far as I know, no other culture came close to this level of artistic excellence and realism for several thousand years (though hard to know, since most ancient art has gone way of dodo). This was a first for the world. And, one might also argue, for scientific illustration.

Hope you enjoyed a little art history and Egyptology with your biology. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

Jen