This post may be a tad late, but to leave these little guys to gather dust on our lab's computer hard drive would have been a shame. Either when staring at clouds for an extended period of time or up at the ceiling before you fall asleep, your mind inadvertently starts putting together connections-- morphing seemingly meaningless shapes into something mundane. After staring at pictures of Ostracods and Foraminiferans on Photoshop for hours on end, I experienced the same thing. In my mind, my conical foram picture looked like an ice cream cone, my oval shaped foram looked like a bunny. So naturally, I thought... why not actually turn them into those things? What I started was a chain reaction of amazingly creative foram/ostracod images overlaid with objects and animals. I will put these images here so the rest of the world can see how the imagination can run rampant even when doing the most scientific of tasks.
I would like to formally introduce you to species never before seen by scientists:
1. Hoppicus carrotless, a hopelessly depressing story of a species meeting it's carrying capacity. There just wasn't enough food to go around. Perhaps this is why this species went extinct.
2. Icecreamicus deliciea, a species that just seemed to melt into the fossil record.
3. Slimicus snailii , extinction caused by high predation due to the outlandish coloring produced by sexual selection.
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4. Frogstracod - A new species apparently very happy to be discovered.
5. Unidentified Specimen #24427, possibly in the genus Turtulagus. We've been a bit slow identifying this one.
6. Impostracod, the mustache made this species very easy to identify.
7. Osctrakhan, a very formidable species with high intraspecific competition. Natural selection seemed to be working in his favor since we have a very high abundance of these fossils... though perhaps natural selection wasn't working hard enough since they are no longer extant.
8. Cytherura bananaformis, known for is remarkably well preserved yellow coloring.
9. Strawberriansus fruitus, origin of name unknown.
We hope you enjoy our creative masterpieces of overlaid fossil images! We spent a lot of time on them! (Of course all of this was done on our breaks....)
Wishing everyone all the best with their future goals and careers,
Beth
