Fawkes The Phoenix Was Based On A Harpy Eagle, Howmcute Would A Kestrel Phoenix Be With A Peacock Tail

since i made a post for inti here’s one for latte too????

latte is. a guy. his name is latte because i worked at a coffee shop when i got him (original). he’s about 12 years old and i found him in an ad online. he was owned by a BP breeder and because of his deformities and issues he wasn’t a breeding prospect, which is totally fair. what wasn’t fair was he was obviously neglected, kept in a small plastic drawer with no enrichment and just a water bowl, his excrement was still in there as well. the guy did the right thing by putting him up for sale if he didn’t have the time or interest for him, but still. that treatment of him wasn’t right. anyway

he has a deformed tail which he seems to have no feeling in at all. he doesn’t know how to shed his skin - he’ll go into blue and then just sit there and occasionally rub his face on things, but nothing more, so he needs bathing monthly and i have to help him shed. he has a head wobble and went off his food for almost a year for seemingly no reason. he’s Very head shy and will freak out if you go near his face (usually).

he just like. forgets how to snake. but then one day his brain cell Activates and he’s suddenly uber hungry and active. i’d love to know what goes on in those neurons when his snake side awakens

he’s a very sweet guy who just wants to chill but has no idea where or who he is at any given time. that’s okay i love him <3 best impulsive preloved buy ever.

Golden rumped elephant shrew (Rhynchocyon chrysopygus) [x]

HORROR/THRILLER/SUSPENSEFUL STORY SETTINGS AND PLOT IDEAS:

[Feel free to use any prompt that shouts out to you! I would very much appreciate a tag if you post a story that was inspired by a prompt of mine! Happy writing everyone!]

A

amusement park (where the ride breaks down with everyone trapped on them, and there is a killer loose in the park…)

art gallery (where paintings trap visitors inside the frame and force them relive the scene the painting was based on...)

aquarium (where the protagonist gets trapped inside one of the shark tanks...)

B

basement (where the basement floods, there’s no way out, and there’s something weird swimming in the water…)

blood bank (where a blood bank is run by a vampire cult…)

board game cafe (where a group of teenagers are forced to play a game of snakes and ladders in real life, with real snakes and real ladders…)

bunker (where the captor holds his victim hostage in an old bunker and convinces the girl that he is protecting her from a world apocalypse…)

C

car (where a taxi driver picks up the wrong person and fears he may never live to tell the tale…)

castle (where the gargoyles come to life and attack the royal family…)

circus (where everyone who is hypnotized by the magician turns into a member of his unholy cult…)

D

desert (where a group of travellers are swept away by a sand storm and wake up in a haunted oasis…)

dungeon (where the visitors pay to torture subjects and the subjects are paid to be tortured…)

F

farmhouse (where the scarecrow comes to life and attempts to create a new body for himself with the farming family’s bodies…)

forest (where a lone hiker is caught in a bear trap in the woods and unable to escape, the bear is close by…)

G

graveyard (where the dead buried at the local cemetery come back to life and all the living people in the town die, except for you…)

H

haunted house (where a house manages to kill anyone who enters it…)

hotel (where the concierge is a vampire with a thirst for his visitors’ blood…)

house (where the family home falls into a sinkhole that leads straight to hell…)

I

island (where a new species of insect is discovered, and when the travellers get bitten, they start mutating into bugs…)

J

jungle (where a group of explorers start disappearing one by one during a rescue mission deep in the jungle…)

L

library (where the ghost of character killed off in a series haunts anyone who reads the book…)

M

military base (where a group of soldiers end up face to face against their canines who have somehow turned into werewolves…)

O

opera house (where the killer murders the musicians with their instruments...)

operating theatre (where an unwilling subject wakes up part way through the operation and is unable to move no matter how hard they try...)

P

prison (where the inmates are released from their cells and the officers are locked up in their place, leaving them at the complete mercy of the prisoners…)

psychiatric ward (where patients are forced to fight to the death in padded cells…)

pyramid (where archeologists discover an ancient tomb and unleash an ancient curse…)

R

railroad (where a cowboy spends his final hours repenting his sins as he lays tied to a railroad track…)

research centre (where the subjects loose the ability to either see, hear, or speak…)

S

sewer (where a family takes cover in the sewers when a nuclear missile is headed towards the city…)

shipwreck (where divers explore an ancient shipwreck, but the pirates are very much still alive and do not take well trespassers…)

space (where there is an explosion on ship leaving the crew without enough oxygen, there are only four extra tanks left, but there are six people…)

submarine (where there's an unknown killer aboard and no way to escape the deep ocean...)

T

tavern (where a knight is seduced and kidnapped by a handmaid who plans on avenging he sisters murder in the most heartless of ways…)

U

underwater (where evil merpeople kidnap scuba divers...)

university (where a group of students engineers create an artificial intelligence that goes rogue and attempts to create a real life body out of human remains…)

V

virtual reality (where virtual reality becomes a true reality, and to escape, 10 players have to survive all levels of the game, but after every level, the loser dies…)

Z

zoo (where the animals turn into zombies and attack their abusers…)

For all the stealth archers out there...

Tetragonula carbonaria trying to harvest pollen from me.

I'd love to hear more about what makes the wings of the stylops so unique! Wings are always fascinating to me

Almost all insects with wings normally have four of them, except that in beetles, the front wings became the shields we call Elytra:

And in the true flies (diptera), the HIND wings became little vibrating knobs we call halteres, which are organic gyroscopes for collecting information about air pressure, direction and elevation, easiest to see on larger flies like this crane fly:

So, the male Strepsiptera is actually the only insect other than flies to have evolved halteres, but the Strepsiptera's halteres are evolved from the FRONT wings:

Their hind wings are odd enough too; simple "fans" unlike the intricately veined wings of other insects, but still not as unusual as forewing halteres. It's thought to be convergent evolution, and that they may have once been elytra like the beetles have. A connection to beetles is also suggested by the fact that a few beetle groups have larvae very similar to those of the strepsipterans, which look like this:

Lovably nasty larvae! They jump, and they're all spiny, and they actually use an acid secretion to melt their way into their first host.

There's one other insect group that incidentally evolved elytra shields, earwigs!

But earwigs can't be ancestral to either beetles or strepsiptera, because earwigs don't go through a larval stage, which the big evolutionary divide for insects; all the insects with larvae are thought to have just one common ancestor, splitting off from the other insects fairly early.

lahore pigeons are some of the most visually appealing birds out there. like in terms of visual design. very minimalist, good contrast.

Hummingbird Clearwing Moth, Hemaris thysbe, family Sphingidae, East Fork State Park, southern Ohio, USA

photographs by Gayle Pille

Valentino at Paris Fashion Week Fall 2005