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jpegmasterjesse:

If you took biology and natural history years ago, you learned a fascinating tale of a microbe dominated primeval earth. In this story, one-celled critters swarmed in primeval oceans, blissfully free of larger predators, for billions of years. Then along came snowball earth, followed by the bloomingCambrian Explosion over half a billion years ago that changed everything.

Shallow oceans were suddenly teeming with giant flesh-eating shrimp like the Animalocaris, massive snails — some armored in chain-mail — on steroids, and other predators of tentacle and chitin patrolling a bizarre watery sea bottom populated with strange frond-like animals, mud-suckinghallucigenia, and of course everyone’s favorite Cambrian critter, trilobites such as the reconstruction illustrated right. It’s a great story of the tenacity of the simplest creatures, the ones that nobly ended a sci-fi Martian attack in H. G. Wells’ classic War of the Worlds. It is also, as we’re learning lately, debatable:

Giant animals (or plants) of any sort is just fascinating. I was in the greenhouse at the Como Zoo about a month ago and they have these plants that make you feel like you are in honey I shrunk the kids. Totally awesome

Luke, I was there yesterday and I felt exactly the same way!