Tasty #TrilobiteTuesday

These little critters are sugar cookies. They were originally created using a standard sugar cookie recipe and shaped using a serrated, bar-shaped extruder in a home cookie press. I was able to find several seemingly appropriate extruder shapes with a couple quick internet searches. The original creator of this design recommended using jelly to glue two halves together and dipping them in chocolate for the face; this version just made a single piece and made the cookies large based on the amount of material pushed out in each one.

-JBB

Image credit: Morgan Bell
https://flic.kr/p/4ixhqX

Original recipe:
http://www.georgehart.com/trilobites/trilobite.html

Won’t directly link to any of the extruders since none of them sponsor us, good luck finding appropriate ones.

(Source: facebook.com)

Chiton Teeth

The dark spots in this shot are one of the most amazing examples of biomineralization on Earth. Life has figured out many ways to use the properties of minerals for support and defense – you are literally being held up now by phosphate biominerals in your skeleton. The dark spots in this frame are teeth made of the mineral magnetite – the only known organism that uses magnetite as an abrasive biomineral.

Chitons are a type of mollusk that lives on the surface of rocks, typically scraping off algae living on the surface for food. These teeth are estimated to be 3x as hard as phosphate enamel used by humans, so the chitons are able to grind away at carbonate rocks using them without the teeth becoming dull. Rocks that have been visited by chitons often have grooves left behind by their teeth, and many small limestone atolls in the Pacific Ocean have eroded notches right at the high tide line – a leftover of chitons living at that boundary and eating away specifically at those rocks using these magnetite teeth.

-JBB

Image source: Nature http://bit.ly/2hqE02o

Reference: http://bit.ly/2gqxpVA

(Source: facebook.com)