Solberg Rock Carvings
The lower field of petroglyphs from Solberg in Sarpsborg, Norway. They are around 3000 years old, from the nordic bronze age.
Gold coin minted in the rarely known Dutch colony of Brazil, 1646
from The National Museum of Denmark
-clips the corners and uses the coin as normal-
Source: samlinger.natmus.dk
The Valþjófsstaður door, an intricately carved door from a medieval Icelandic church dating to around 1200 AD
On display at the National Museum of Iceland
Wine vessel in the form of a woman's head, Etruscan, 520-500 BC
from The State Museum of Berlin
Source: recherche.smb.museum
Just hall of fame creature eyes 👀
I had a split-eyed owlfly visit my black light last night, for the first time. Hello strange fuzzy friend. 🤎
5 Misconceptions about Medieval Sieges in Movies
from SandRhoman History
enjoying the variation in these handsome Graphocephala versuta, including the last poor hopper who has a mite sucking on its head
more hoppers & friends!
an Aplos simplex (Issidae) with a very powerful tail
Stictocephala taurina and Stictocephala diceros (Membracidae), little bulls about to butt heads (they don’t actually do that)
a very goopy looking recently molted Oncometopia orbona sharpshooter (Cicadellidae)
I will not accept a life I do not deserve.
X (2022) dir. Ti West
More from the Book of the Dead of Imuthes at the Met. I’m pretty sure these are some of the demons from Chapters 144-145 – the door guardians whose names the deceased must be ready to give.
[Delicately painted stick-figure deities stand above columns of hieroglyphs, each one with the title written in red (the rubric). Each figure holds two knives and most guard a door. All face right. Top, right to left: falcon head, uraeus head, then three seated mummiform figures holding a knife: lioness with three uraei on her head, hippo head with plumed sundisc, uraeus head. Middle, right to left: falcon head, crocodile head, rabbit head, Bes face (looking out of the page), falcon head. Bottom, right to left: jackal head, human head, heron / benu-bird / phoenix head, falcon head, crocodile head. (The photos overlap).]
Rosa Bonheur, Martin, 1879. 2 / Barbaro après la chasse, 1858. Philadelphia Museum of Art. 3 / Study of a dog, 1860s. Princeton Art Museum 4/ Étude de chien de chasse, 8 sketches, Château de Fontainebleau
a lucky five minutes of walking turned up four beautiful deceased insects!
these four are a two-spotted bumblebee (Bombus bimaculatus) queen (?), a reddish-brown stag beetle (Lucanus capreolus), a broad-necked root borer (Prionus laticollis) and a rainbow dung beetle (Phanaeus vindex), the first I’ve ever seen
the Prionus is missing several parts and the Phanaeus was stepped on, but the other two are pristine. I’ll try to clean up and pin all of them! much more so than killing and pinning live insects, I enjoy fixing up a dusty old dead bug found on the street or in a windowsill. it’s sort of like antique restoration…
the bee died with her stinger and tongue fully extended, which is nice since I’ll get to preserve parts that aren’t easy to see on a live animal.
opening a beetle’s elytra feels like looking under the hood of a car! this Prionus was a bit dusty, so I used a fine paintbrush to sweep out some dirt and clean off the wings.
you’ll notice I also extended the impressive ovipositor on her, used to inject eggs deep into the substrate where they will tunnel and feed on dead wood.
she seems to have a crack in her face, and no antennae, but those powerful cerambycid jaws are still sharp! perhaps she ran afoul of a bird after being exhausted from laying eggs.
Phanaeus is a lot flatter than it should be, and also fully dried out. I’ll see if I can get it back in shape after rehydrating, but not sure how well that’ll go.
aside from a bit of mud, the stag is in pristine condition! I find a lot of these dead, so I’ve got plenty of experience pinning them. I’ll need to tuck those wings in and wipe of the mud, but he should end up a handsome example of a medium sized male
⚜️ Embossing of elbow pads
Reconstruction of the left gauntlet from the "Lion armor" (Italy, 1550), possibly made for Henry II de Valois, king of France
- -
⚜️ Чеканка налокотников для реконструкции «Львиного доспеха» (Италия, 1550 год), который возможно принадлежал Генриху II Валуа, королю Франции
#Lionarmor #стальноенаследие #steellegacy #armororder #orderarmor #armsandarmor #armure #harnisch #harness #armatura #armadura #доспехиназаказ
~ Bead Net Funerary Shroud.
Place of origin: Egypt
Date: 664–525 B.C.
Medium: Faience beads on bast fiber (probably linen).
Source: artic.edu
just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees
They existed *before beetles*
Why is this sad? Why am I sad?
This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees' range has shrunk by 90%.
(my own photos)
Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.
Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would've penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you've observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.
You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:

First quote from the linked article. Found it poetic.
Y’all, I’m over here DYING cuz Google suggested me this article about the crisis of backyard chicken keepers– which is that they love having chickens so much that they keep getting more, and then don’t know what to do with all the eggs.
Which I can see how this would be a problem, but it’s just so funny to me because they had interviewed this one guy who started off with 3 chickens, and then kept adding more and more, and eventually started donating the eggs to a local food bank, and at the end of the year when they wrote him a tax receipt, he discovered he’d donated over 400 dozen eggs.
Seriously, it was a whole article talking very seriously about how people are so into chickens that they just keep collecting them like pokemon and then have to “scramble” (their words not mine) to get rid of the eggs, because they weren’t even thinking of egg production, they just loved having chickens.
And while I may be over here laughing a bit too hard, honestly? Big Mood.
“but without the profit motive people won’t work”
Dinosaur Anti-Capitalism
Some of the baby birds I met on this recent round of field work:
1. Limosa limosa, black-tailed godwit
2. Haematopus ostralegus, oystercatcher
3. & 4. Numenius phaeopus, Eurasian whimbrel
5. Tringa totanus, redshank
6. Charadrius hiaticula, common ringed plover
7. Pluvialis apricaria, European golden plover
highly recommend reading pliny the elder if only for the footnotes. theyre like video game loading screen tips
Marble bust of the great Athenian general, orator, and statesman Pericles (ca. 495-429 BCE), shown here wearing a Corinthian helmet. Pericles is credited by many historians, notably Thucydides, with guiding 5th century BCE Athens to its peak of greatness; among his achievements were the ambitious building program on the Parthenon and the conversion of the Delian League, originally formed to combat the Persians, into a tribute-paying Athenian empire. His reputation was not, however, unblemished. His political opponents accused him of aiming at tyranny, while his enforcement of the Megarian Decree--which barred Sparta's ally Megara from all Athenian harbors and was effectively an act of economic warfare--may have been the proximate cause of the Peloponnesian War. His death from plague plunged Athens into crisis and led to a succession of populist leaders such as Cleon and Hyperbolus, whose far more aggressive foreign policy ultimately proved disastrous for Athens. Though the city would survive and even make a second attempt at empire-building, it never regained the unchallenged supremacy it had enjoyed in the Periclean period.
Roman copy of uncertain date after a lost Greek original. Now in the Museo Chiaramonti, Vatican City.