If you haven't seen Avatar yet- I'd recommend it. If only for the crazy alien rain forest imagined in 3-D.
The LA Times had a crazy article detailing the painstaking scientific approach to the flora and fauna culture on a very different planet.
Jodie Holt, chairwoman of the department of botany and plant sciences at UC Riverside, was approached to consult on the film's plant life, as well as how a botanist would study such flora:
In mid-December, a book was published called "Avatar: An Activist Survival Guide." The plant descriptions I wrote are in Chapter 4. These include taxonomy (Latin names I made up using the correct rules of nomenclature), a description of each plant, and information about ecology and ethnobotany. Since some of the plants looked like Earth plants, while others were quite fantastic, and others resembled each other, I started by grouping them by somewhat similar appearance to develop a crude taxonomy.
For plants that resembled Earth plants, I gave them similar names, such as Pseudocycas altissima for a plant that looks like a tall Earth cycad. Others I named for their appearance, such as Obesus rotundus for the puffball tree.
This project was very challenging but also a lot of fun. What botanist would not want to "discover" new plants and name them herself?
LA Times
1 comments:
Let's hear it!