Ugly? Adorable? Uglorable!

Uglorable is 5 years old today.

And in honor of its birthday, a lumpsucker!

Lumpsuckers are a favorite among fish & wildlife students. They have a little suction cup on them, so they stick to stuff.

Hedgehogs spines are specialized hairs, and it looks like baby hedgehogs are born with hair where it counts.

Photo credit unknown. Thanks Wess!

I’m told this dog looks like me.

If you don’t know what I look like, you’ll just have to imagine how I must look.

Like a lot of us, this snake is taking on more than it can chew.

Photo credit unknown. Via Haha.nu.

Pigmentation deserves to be the topic of a great series of posts. Albinism is the relative lack of a specific common pigmentation, melanin. Leucism is the relative lack of all pigmentation. This bison appears not to be an albino, but a leuc— a leuco? Leucic? Leucist? Well, this post has been derailed. Leucid? Euclid? Lucario?

You can read more about white bison on the Wikipedia article titled “White Buffalo“.

Photo credit found by clicking on photos. Thanks Matt!
Apologies to anyone who googled “euclid lucario.” This is not what you wanted. I doubt what you want exists anywhere.

Today’s Dinosaur Comic directed me to the Wikipedia article on the Torosaurus. But the pictures I saw made no sense to me. Then I realized that scientists misunderstood the skeleton.

The mystery of the torosaurus has been solved! Truly this is a great day for science.

(Source images and licenses here: 1 2)

So I was studying for my ichthyology final which is in… Ten hours… And I came across this awesome video that my professor used in one of his lectures. And I’ve been meaning to see if I could find it online, but I forgot about it until just now. So here it is.

Watch it SHOOT OUT ITS PHARYNGEAL JAWS (secondary jaws in the throat, basically). For the record, before this no one knew pharyngeal jaws were used for capture. It’s just… Awesome!

I’m taking Ichthyology right now, and my professor showed a picture of a baby ocean sunfish in class. Apparently they have up to 300 million babies at a time. And they’re tiny and planktonic and uglorable.

I will probably be posting fish for a while…. A lot of them are pretty uglorable.

(click for photo credit)

While my father was in Hokkaido (the large northern Japanese island), he took this picture of this sign:

Walruses: heck yes.

This translation is a little iffy, but you ought to watch this, it is the best thing.