Credits
Every moving image in this zoo was made by someone else and released under a licence that lets us show it. Where a licence asks for attribution, we give it. Where it does not, we give it anyway — these films took patience that we did not spend.
What we did to it: each clip was trimmed to a short looping window and re-encoded for streaming, and nothing else — no retouching, no colour grading, no change of speed. Each portrait states its own window against the length of the source it came from.
The microscopists
Almost every portrait in this collection traces back to a very small number of people who film organisms patiently and then give the results away. This museum exists because they did.
The scale rungs
Powers of Ten measures the cast against everyday things — a hand, a grain of rice, a red blood cell — and each of those is a photograph of the real object. Same rule as the animals: if you can see it here, somebody photographed it.
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How the science is checked
The words in this zoo are not ours alone. A portrait's factual claims go to someone who knows the biology, and its hook line goes to a curator — both on Tinkerism, in public, with the decisions on record. That loop is not open yet. Until it is, every claim here rests on the sources printed beside it, and you are welcome to check them. There are no badges on the animals; the record, when there is one, is public.
If you would like to see what is still waiting on somebody, theContribute control at the top of any page turns the work lights on: the room dims, and everything still open is marked where it sits. It is off unless you ask for it, and nothing it marks is a finished thing — the layer shows what is open, never who signed off what.
Media rights and organism identification are not crowd work. We carry those ourselves. A zoo that mislabels its animals has nothing left.
Haeckel
Kunstformen der Natur plates hang in the Haeckel Room, which carries its own wall label about the man who drew them. It is not a flattering one.