If your eyes migrated around your head, you’d rest a lot too.
Tag Archives: Virginia Living Museum – Newport News
Shrimp
Pipefish
Packrat
I’d never actually seen a packrat before. Very few zoos have rats*, and those that do tend to have them in nocturnal exhibits. So you often either get a photo of a sleeping ball of fur, or you get a dark blurry photo of an awake rat. These guys were a bit more cooperative and stood right in the light for me.
*Eell, OK, all zoos have rats. Very few of them are intentionally on exhibit.
Eastern Screech Owl
Crab
Box Turtle
Sign
Aenenome
This aenenome was about the size of a dime*.
* US *or* Canadian. They’re pretty much the same size in both countries**.
** Can you believe that only two countries have a dime coin? Turns out that the first people to suggest a decimal-based were Thomas Jefferson***, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton***, and David Rittenhouse in 1783. That’s right, the country that invented decimal money is one of the last in the world to adopt metric measurement.
*** Dude can rap like you wouldn’t believe.
Sign
Long Tailed Salamander
This salamander is wondering why narrators are always talking about how this building or that can “be seen from space”.
“If we can see can see OGLE-2014-BLG-0124Lb, 76,422,100,000,000,000 miles* away, seeing something from orbit is nothing to brag about.
Even factoring in relative sizes, at half the mass of Jupiter, assuming similar density, OGLE-2014-BLG-0124Lb would have a diameter of 68,957.812 miles.
So, from a low earth orbit of 200 miles up, you should be able to see things that are 0.0000000001805 miles wide. That’s 0.00001143 inches … smaller than a human hair.”
Salamanders think they understand satellite imagery, but they really don’t.
* Converted to Western measurement for American readers. Salamanders still work in aṅgulas.