#mark thiessen

Found most frequently on the Taketomi, Hatoma, and Iriomote islands of Japan, star sand is exactly what the name implies— small, millimeter-sized pieces of sand in the shape of stars. Each little star is the exoskeleton of a small, single-celled organism called Foraminifera.

Rising Sun

Seeing with sound: Real life bats are more like superheroes than you may think—and they’ve evolved for over 50 million years to do so. Some examples: bats can be infected with deadly viruses and not get sick, have the longest lifespan of any other mammal relative to their body size, and bounce high-frequency sounds off objects and listen for their echoes to calculate the distance, size, and shape of objects. (Above, a bat in flight catches a moth.)

Grabbing a meal: It seemed like an impossible assignment. Capture an erratically flying bat grabbing a moth mid-flight—in the dark.

Even T. rex would have feared Zuul, the 'destroyer of shins' Zuul crurivastator, a recently discovered species of ankylosaurid, was a 20-foot-long living tank bristling with armor. In death, this hulking fossil is amazingly well-preserved from its snout to its sledgehammer-like tail—the perfect weapon for delivering bone-shattering damage.

The arrival in North America of Asian giant hornets—nicknamed “murder hornets”—set off a firestorm. The world’s largest wasps (shown above) are native to much of East Asia, but in fall 2019, a small number were found near Vancouver, British Columbia—and two of them showed up in northwestern Washington State.