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Here’s a word of the day for you: Teuthology. What does it mean? It’s the study of cephalopods. What are cephalopods? Well, they are a class of mollusks that include two extant subclasses: Coleoidea and Nautiloidea. Still not sure what cephalopods are? You probably know them by their more common monikers: octopuses, squid, cuttlefish, and nautiluses. There are over 800 living species of cephalopods known today. Dr. Ian G. Gleadall has been studying the biology of cephalopods (particularly octopuses) for 40 years. Dr. Gleadall (a marine biologist who works in Sendai, Japan) discovered BHL in November, 2014 while visiting the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. It has had a profound impact on his research.

Tarantulas are amazing. Not only do they include the largest of all spiders, with some species reaching a legspan the size of a dinner plate, but they are arguably some of the most beautiful too. While famous for giants that inhabit the jungles of South America, some species barely grow larger than your thumb nail. Some species live on trees in damp forests while others live in self-constructed tubular burrows in the ground in some of the most inhospitable deserts. Some have special protective hairs on their bodies which cause extreme itching when they come into contact with the mucous membranes of potential predators, while others produce a hissing sound in self-defense.

A new land snail species from Laos has been named in honor of the Biodiversity Heritage Library! Vargapupa biheli, a medium-sized, slender turriform species with a well developed basal keel, was described in the article “Revision of the Genus Pseudopomatias and its Relatives (Gastropoda: Cyclophoroidea: Pupinidae” in Zootaxa: 3937(1), 2015, by Barna Páll-Gergely, Zoltán Fehér, András Hunyadi, and Takahiro Asami.