October 30, 2012 by Designsquish

September 26, 2012 by Designsquish

August 01, 2012 by Designsquish

June 23, 2012 by Designsquish

April 17, 2012 by Designsquish

Was Henry Darger inspired by postcard above?

July 26, 2011 by Designsquish

July 19, 2011 by Designsquish

by Designsquish

June 11, 2011 by Designsquish

Thirty five leaves silhouettes can be found on http://forestry.about.com

June 04, 2011 by Designsquish

February 19, 2011 by Designsquish

The Laughing Owl (Sceloglaux albifacies), also known as Whēkau or the White-faced Owl, was an endemic owl found in New Zealand, but is now extinct. It was plentiful when European settlers arrived in New Zealand in 1840.  By 1880, the species was becoming rare, and the last recorded specimen was found dead at Bluecliffs Station in Canterbury, New Zealand on July 5, 1914

The Laughing Owl generally occupied rocky, low rainfall areas. Being quite large, Laughing Owls were able to deal with the introduced European rats that had caused the extinction of so much of their prey; however, the stoats introduced to control feral rabbits, and feral cats were too much for the species.

January 31, 2011 by Designsquish

Moths and butterflies illustrations by Eugene Seguy

December 22, 2010 by Designsquish

Botanic illustration drawings by Ernst Haeckel

November 19, 2010 by Designsquish

Detail from: A Still Life of Tulips and Other Flowers.
Jacob Marrel
1681, Oil on Canvas

Details from: A Glass of flowers and Orange Twig
Abraham Mignon
1660, Oil on canvas

September 16, 2010 by Designsquish

“The most notable characteristic of bowerbirds is their extraordinarily complex courtship and mating behaviour, where males build a bower to attract mates. There are two main types of bowers. One clade of bowerbirds build so-called maypole bowers that are constructed by placing sticks around a sapling, in some species these bowers have a hut-like roof. The other major bowerbuilding clade builds an avenue type bower made of two walls of vertically placed sticks. In and around the bower the male places a variety of brightly colored objects he has collected. These objects — usually different among each species — may include hundreds of shells, leaves, flowers, feathers, stones, berries, and even discarded plastic items, coins, nails, rifle shells, or pieces of glass” - Wiki.

July 26, 2010 by Designsquish

Forest Floor Still Life by Otto Marseus Van Schrieck. Otto was a Dutch painter best known for mysterious dark close-ups of the live undergrowth of forest floors that give detailed views of
wild flowers, weeds, thistles, and mushrooms, lives of insects.

Even though it is not really a still-life, I think this painting is particularly amazing because of how still it is.

June 04, 2010 by Designsquish

The discovery, which the researchers reported last week in Nature, supports research showing that birds are dinosaurs, having descended from a group of bipedal dinosaurs called theropods.
Dr. Prum and his colleagues, meanwhile, had set out on a similar quest. Working with paleontologists at the Beijing Museum of Natural History and Peking University, the researchers began to study a 150-million-year-old species called Anchiornis huxleyi. The chicken-sized theropod was festooned with long feathers on its arms and legs.

Above: Mohawk Dinosaur

Scientsts were able to assign color to individual feathers and thus work out color patterns for the entire fossil of Anchiornis huxleyi, a small, feathered, two-legged dinosaur that lived roughly 150 million years ago.  The animal would have weighed about four ounces (110 grams) and appears to have had a dark gray or black body and wings with some white feathers that gave it a stripe pattern, plus a reddish-brown crest and speckles on the face. ( Source:  New York Times and Discovery News)

March 30, 2010 by Designsquish

November Meteors

Mare Humorum. From Study made in 1875.

Sun as Revealed by Telescope and Spectroscope

February 20, 2010 by Designsquish