I collaborated on the snails in short series and had a great time working on these with @franzanth.bsky.social

Don't sleep on the crab database as a source for
#InsertAnInvert2024! Here are images of all 3 of the suggested true crab species this week:

Ixa cylindrus by Ondřej Radosta
Stenorhynchus debilis (close enough) by Arthur Anker
Ranina ranina by Tin-Yam Chan

Explore this website! 🦀🧪

A pen line drawing of a dumpy looking wasp, with short stubby legs, small wings and a large round abdomen.

Early Cretaceous hatchet wasp!
Procretevania exquisita, a parasitic wasp from the Yixian Formation of China! #paleoart #wasp #insect #entomology

crab anatomy diagram that covers the basics of the crab anatomy and names of various body parts

diagram that shows the various different shapes of crab claws and how the shapes relate to their lifestyles

diagram showing the various segments of crab legs and how the different leg shapes relate to their lifestyles

diagram showing all the complicated limbs that sprout out from a crab's face

Quick crab drawing guides that @jopabinia.bsky.social and I made a few years back to get you all started for this month's #InsertAnInvert2024 theme: Carcinization.

Fun fact, this was the beginning of the whole "Insert An Invert" series

Left: Snail infected with Leucochloridium passeri collected from Hemei Township (Changhua County) by Jui-An Lin, photo. Top right: Labelled L. passeri broodsac. Bottom right: A trio of L. passeri broodsacs with metacercariae removed from an infected snail.

When most people think of the "zombie snail parasite" they think Leucochloridium paradoxum - but that's just one out of ten different species of Leucochloridium.

They all have different colours and patterns, this one is called L. passeri.
#invertebrate 🧪
dailyparasite.blogspot.com/2023/01/leuc...

The most famous bug in Australia is the Witchetty Grub. It's the larvae of the Cossid wood moth and an Indigenous Australian delicacy. The grub is the most important insect food of the desert. It's high in protein and tastes like chicken and scrambled eggs.

#Invertefest

Thetys vagina. Seen swimming through a night time plankton soup, it is several inches long and looks like a transparent blob with some interior structures from anterior to posterior. The gut is yellow/orange. ALSO there are a bunch of hyperiid amphipods riding on the blob head end! Screencap from gopro video on my blackwater dive in Tulamben Bali

Funny leathery sock like critter, Polycarpa aurata. It's stuck to the seafloor and has 2 big openings. Mostly light orange with bright purple grooves and some tubercles on the outside Photo from Seraya, Tulamben Bali

A bunch of Didemnum molle attached to a rope(?) which is overgrown with sea life. There are 20-30 small round individuals in the colony, and one big one that you can see inside the siphons. They are white on the outside and green on the inside Photo at Seraya, Tulamben Bali

The #InverteFest group most closely related to us: tunicates!

Yes, they are part of chordates, whether they represent the largest free swimming salp (Thetys vagina) or sessile species (Polycarpa aurata and the colonial Didemnum molle)! 🦑🧪

*check out the amphipods riding the salp

A poster with lineart of Bug Pókemon from the Sinnoh Region depicted in realistic style.

It's the last day of #InverteFest and I'm working on something with bugs! Kind of.

It was once believed that you could predict the harshness of an upcoming winter by looking at the stripes of wooly bear caterpillars. A large central brown stripe indicates a mild winter, while a small stripe means it will be harsh 🐛
#InverteFest

a poster showing 14 different crab species. there's a lanky boi, there's one with serrated claws, another with triangular carapace, a hermit crab in ammonite shell, and so on.

#InverteFest runs until the end of the month (Tuesday).

Keep posting your invertebrate art, plug your merch & service, find some bugs in the wild, do whatever you want.

Here's our community science project on iNat if you haven't joined: www.inaturalist.org/projects/inv...

a large watercolor journal page with watercolor illustrations of 4 different marine worms: a brown knotted up ribbon worm, a fluffy reddish pink and blue feather duster worm protruding from a tube, a purplish blue shinny scale worm and a yellow white and black oval shaped flatworm

I finished my April #InsertAnInvert2024 with an Elvis worm just in time for #InverteFest.

I LOVED drawing the different marine worms.

#SciArt

In European folklore, stag beetles were often associated with the devil, and some believed they would carry burning coals in their mandibles to set houses on fire
#InverteFest

Full body view of the beautiful peacock mantis shrimp in every color of the rainbow. You see why it's called the peacock as there are bright colored spots on the uropods and on the antennal scales. Melasti, Tulamben Bali

Another of the same species. This one is shy so it is mostly in a burrow, but its amazing eyes seem entrained on my camera Melasti, Tulamben Bali

Black water that looks like outer space. In the center is a weird transparent mantis shrimp larva with one pair elongated hooked appendages (these are the smashy ones in adults)

Been waiting to deploy my mantis shrimps for #InverteFest! The first two are a cheeky and a a shy individual of Odontodactylus scyllarus, the most beautiful species. The last is a terrible picture of a larval stage somersaulting in blackwater 😍🦑

InsertAnInvert2024

Wormification week 3: long, not limbless

Fuchsia flatworm (pseudoceros ferrugineus)

InsertAnInvert2024

Wormification week 2: long, not limbless

Giant tube worm (riftia pachyptila)

to include new information.

For those that don't wanna wait, I've shared many of my recent projects in the discord - disboard.org/server/12121...

Imma be lookin over and sharing a lot of the cool stuff I missed, so I do apologize if I'm fillin your feeds!

Mesozoic deadfall communities - an ancient ecology This post is about Mesozoic deadfall communities - think whalefalls, but marine reptiles! The dead bodies of large aquatic animals have a b...

Ah crap, I've somehow managed to miss most of InverteFest!

Been writing several new blogposts and also workin on two large speculative evolution projects, one of which will be posted here real soon.

In the meantime, I've updated this one
invertposting.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-...

Rules for the project, links for resources, and potential pieces of inspiration can be found in the server

discord.gg/7bq7Vj9bmt

Hope to see ya there!

Happy #InverteFest! My discord server is hosting an invetebrate-themed #speculativeevolution project, focusing on invertebrates that might've existed in deep time but didn't fossilize; bring your best hypothetical radiodonts and weirdest cycad pollinators

Close up portrait of a green mantis looking directly at the viewer on a soft, out of focus shadowy green background.

A mantis, for #InverteFest

Pencils and gouache on 9x12" hotpress paper.

#insects

A macro photo of a tiny, newly-hatched green katydid perched on a fingertip against a blue-green background.

A #TBT pic for #InverteFest - a newly-hatched angle-wing katydid (Microcentrum sp.) on my fingertip. I don't put myself in the picture that often, but sometimes it's fun for scale. Antennae for days. 🐙 🌿

The creature on the cover of "17 Defunct Arthropods" is Marmacuma samimei, an extinct hooded shrimp from Late Pleistocene Turkey, where it lived in a hypersaline lagoon until its home reconnected with the Black Sea, then died out due to fatally drastic salinity changes
#InverteFest

The trilobite on the cover of my Brief Primer of Trilobites is the legendary Terataspis grandis, a gigantic lichid trilobite from Early Devonian New York and Ontario. It's known from fragments that suggest an adult animal of at least 60 centimeters in length.
#InverteFest

A giant snail with structures and windows on its shell, accompanied by octopuses, traversing choppy waters.

Making our way to #InverteFest.🐌

#guildeleven #art

That's about it; like I said check the blog for more information! Happy InverteFest!

Sea Monsters avoids this depiction all together, it simply has em mouth-up, floating after being knocked loose. Very nice to see an extinct echinoderm in paleomedia!!

Some older interpretations suggest that its calyx was filled with gas and it floated along, dredging its arms along the seafloor, but this is likely untrue, as summarized below in this blogpost by Christopher Taylor - coo.fieldofscience.com/2010/02/crin...

A juvenile is seen later on, swimming amongst a group of Uintacrinus. Uintacrinus is an odd crinoid because it seems to lack a stalk.

Reconstructing fossil cephalopods: Enchoteuthis (“Tusoteuthis” ) Enchoteuthis melanae drifts peacefully amongst a shoal of Baculites. Art by Prehistorica, used with permission. The Enchoteuthinae are a subfamily of large cephalopods from the Cretaceous of North Ame...

Tyler Greenfield has a wonderful blogpost summarizing recent research and sharing modern takes on anatomy, phylogeny and more!

incertaesedisblog.wordpress.com/2020/07/03/r...

The other cephalopod, the shell-less Tusoteuthis has not aged well at all; modern research suggests a vaguely Humboldt Squid-like appearance.

Tusoteuthis is also no longer regarded as valid, specimens attributed to the genus are either undiagonstic or belong to Enchoteuthis.