sunshower incarnate

I’m glad humans evolved to Boop the Snoot for Good Luck.

glowing as though holy

Oh, to be a little kitten who just got vaccinated and then taken to a high-end restaurant and tasted the best food the chefs could offer and then fell asleep in a basket.

“character who gained weight to show how they are healthy now” trope my beloved

the sinister sniler

I would let her kill me for sport

Graced by Geckolepis typica from Madagascar. I love that they’re quite round creatures and then they have these dainty little toes. Also, their scales are full bone and both scale and skin come off when they get grabbed, which is…unpleasant. Consequently, catching these geckos for research without damaging them requires special techniques. 19th century researchers used bundles of cotton wool, but I imagine this wasn’t very effective, because cotton still has a lot of friction and the friction would pull the skin and scales off. In my (quite extensive) experience, the best technique is to carefully and quickly flick the geckos from their tree trunk or branch into an open dry plastic bag using a finger or stick.

Not only do they grow back, but they come back so well that we cannot even tell where they have ripped off before. This is very weird, because when a lizard loses its tail, it is very obvious where it has been lost and regrown. Not so these chaps. They seek out a humid place to hide, and within a few weeks, skin and scales have started to regrow. The fact that they can do this so well is the reason a team has just sequenced their genome. I believe it is hoped that the skin regeneration tech they have built into their cells could eventually be harnessed for human skin grafts.