I’ve always found animals fascinating, some more than others. The depth of my fascination of course is based on how often I see them. On the first floor of my department, there’s a glass display of various wet and dry specimens for research and academic purposes. I’ve been walking past them for a couple of weeks now and have been telling myself I’ll take a day to check them out. Yesterday I finally did, and although I didn’t take a photo of everything, I’ll show you the few ones I was able to shoot.
This possum was unfortunately at a height that presented serious difficulty in taking a photo. I had two options: shoot from the angle you’re looking at here (down below), or climb to a higher floor, zoom and shoot from above. Neither was going to produce a photo free of reflections, so I just stuck with this version. As you can see here, because it was in a glass, the reflections made it hard to capture just the possum. I took MULTIPLE shots to come close to what you see here (a photo with the least reflections). I’ve never seen a possum a possum in person before, but my wildlife documentary-watching apparently pays off because I identified it the second I saw it.
I’m going to let you guess what the name of this bird is. For the amount of wildlife documentaries I watch, it’s a shame (and surprising) to admit that I’d never seen it until yesterday. But apparently this birdie is an Anhinga.
Here’s another bird that I bet you also don’t know. My phone was not able to identify this one either, but a google image search showed it’s called Lady Amherst Pheasant. When I dug a little bit deeper, I found that that’s not exactly this specific bird’s name, but rather the name of the class of birds with its characteristics. Some beautiful birds, I should say. Those things dropping from around the ear region look like necklaces, is a feature peculiar to its group. Very nice.
I was just getting ready to run a google search on it when I noticed this little button (also for the first time) on my screen, and after tapping, my phone just looked it up and showed me the name. Cool feature. I’ve been looking up all sorts of things after finding that out.
This fella in the jar here, I’m putting my money on baby HammerHead Shark. That was the first thing that came to mind when I saw it, and I can’t think of anything else. The distance and reflection made it difficult to see the full features to be able to confirm. But the distinctive hammer looking head, fins and what looks like it’s mouth near the top, make me pretty confident.
I compared them to pictures I found on Google of small hammerhead and oh wait…that’s actually a bonnethead shark, which, to my credit, is just smaller sibling of a hammerhead shark. I did some more reading here and apparently they’re in the same family, but hammerheads are just like the large size siblings, and are close to 5 times bigger than bonnetheads get.
What I reeaalllyy excited to see this octopus. The arms and suckers were very obvious, so it was easy to pin that one. It did seem a bit odd that it appeared like it was attempting to open the jar in this picture. I’ve seen some information online that they’re able to use the suckers on their arms to suck on and twist things open when they’re confined. Creepy, but cool.
I’m just going to drop this here. What’s that? I think Manta ray because of that long sting-looking tail, but I’m also wise enough to know it’s not because that head is not a manta ray’s.😂
Also going to just drop these terrifying bony heads of these fishes. Those teeth tell you all you need to know.😂 I didn’t pay attention to that jar on the left, but it looks like a remora because of those suction thingies on its underside.
This is not an organism and it’s not in the same glass as these other specimens, but it represents a concept that’s currently stressing me out a lot. I’m taking introductory advanced biochem and it just gets more advanced every single day.😂
This is what the entirety of this glass looked like. There are about I think 4 more of these on other floors. I’ll check more out in the course of the semester, and we’ll continue this identify game. The names of the organisms were there btw. I didn’t look because I wanted to see how far marine and wildlife would take me😂. I’ll go back to learn about the organisms I wasn’t able to identify on Monday.
All photos are mine