Kunstformen der Natur "Artforms of Nature" as drawn by 19th century german physician ernst haeckel. really, really beautiful images, showing just a wee bit of the variety in life on this planet, from unicellular diatoms to plants to mammals. (this has been aired on mefi but seems to be new here.)

haeckel later admitted that many of the images were tweaked to make symmetry more apparent, or to just heighten the overall artistic quality of the image. kunstformen dub takes the tweaking further, "remixing" some of the images into two mpeg movies of fantastic patterns. i first saw these images during a talk by the late stephen j. gould, eminent biologist. he discussed both the inherent beauty in life as well as haeckel's inability to let the scientist win over the artist in him while drawing them. i've since used some of them as backdrop slides at the beginning of biology lectures. all the images (and text, if you read german) from the book are part of Kurt Stüber's Online Library, which also houses Darwin, Lamarck, and Alexander von Humboldt (the Gregor Mendel section appears to be down for now...).