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Saunder’s case moth, Metura elongatus, Psychidae

Found in the eastern half of Australia and Tasmania, the Saunder’s case moth is a type of bagworm. Females remain in their larval case for life - before, during, and after pupation; they are wingless even as adults. The case itself is made of silk and covered with bits of leaf and twigs that act as camouflage. Males emerge from their case after pupation to seek a mate.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a photo to share of an adult female; the ones above are adult males, a caterpillar in its case, and a pupa.

Nudibranch/sea slug - themed Doppelganger designs. :> all have been sold except the first B (spanish shawl nudibranch), he is available for 28USD 

1. With Roger’s voice actor standing off camera, Bob Hoskins acts into empty air and frantically sawing at his handcuff, continually looking up and down at different visual marks of various depths. Look at the slow pan up of his eyes in gif 4, and then the quick shift to his side. Think about how, on set, he was looking at nothing. 

2. Starting in gif 2, The box must be made to stop shaking, either by concealed crew member, mechanism, or Hoskins own dextrousness, as he is doing all of the things mentioned in point 1. 

3. In all gifs, Roger’s handcuff has to be made to move appropriately through a hidden mechanism. (If you watch the 4th gif closely you can see the split second where it is replaced by an animated facsimile of the actual handcuff, but just for barely a second.)

4. The crew voluntarily (we know this because it is now a common internal phrase at Disney for putting in extra work for small but significant reward) decided to make Roger bump the lamp and give the entire scene a constantly moving light source that had to be matched between the on set footage and Roger. This was for two reasons, A) Robert Zemeckis thought it would be funnier, and B) one of the key techniques the crew employed to make the audience instinctually accept that Toons coexisted with the live action environment was constant interaction with it. This is why, other than comedy, Roger is so dang clumsy. Instead of isolating Toons from real objects to make it easier for themselves, the production went out of its way to make Toons interact more with the live action set than even real actors necessarily would, in order to subtly, constantly remind the audience that they have real palpable presence. You can watch the whole scene here, just to see how few shots there are of Roger where he doesn’t interact with a real object. 

The crew and animators did all of this with hand drawn cell animation without computerized special effects. 1988, we were still five years out from Jurassic Park, the first movie to make the leap from fully physical creature effects to seamlessly integrating realistic computer generated images with live action footage. Roger’s shadows weren’t done with CGI. Hoskin’s sightlines were not digitally altered. Wires controlling the handcuff were not removed in post. 

On the surface level, it’s amazing. I saw it as a kid in the theater, and was blown away. It was hilarious, it was scary. It was a love letter to the era of cartooning and noir crime stories. It did what many considered a “never in a million years” scenario: Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, the bajillion-dollar symbols of rivals WB and Disney’s cartoon empires, sharing the screen together in cooperation. Think of the “holy shit” factor when the latest Smash Bros game reveals a major non-Nintendo character is in it, multiplied by about a billion because this shit never happened back then. This may not have been the first improbable cinematic crossover, but damn if it wasn’t one of the biggest, if not THE biggest.

(Plus of course Daffy and Donald Duck’s amazing piano duel, and closing the film with both Porky Pig and Tinkerbell in their famous signoffs.)

It was a technical marvel, making you forget the sheer amount of work that had to go into integrating the toons into the film. For the technology of the time, even when there’s rough-around-the-edges bits, it’s an amazing accomplishment in practical effects and hand-drawn animation that I appreciate more and more.

Gifs Show How Mushrooms Grow

Researchers have used Easter Island Moai replicas to show how they might have been “walked” to where they are displayed.

Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it

Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/

“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.

In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.

“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/16/inuit-canada-britain-shipwreck-hms-terror-nunavut

“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”

Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.

“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”

it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.