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"Animals Speak Color" at the Harvard Museum of Natural History
Anna Kushnir
Tuesday, 28 October 2008 21:56 UTC
The Harvard Museum of Natural History is hosting a special exhibition on color in the animal kingdom. The exhibit, which combines physical specimens, photographs, and interactive stations, narrates the role of color in the lives of animals, from striking poisonous snakes to color-shifting cuttlefish and explosively colored parrots. The description of the exhibit can be found here.
My favorite line out of the press release about the exhibition is not the most informative one, but definitely the most entertaining -
“And some colors are produced not by pigments, but by microstructures in fur, feathers, or scales that reflect only certain wavelengths of light. If you’re Kermit the Frog, you are green not because you have green pigment, but because you reflect blue light through yellow pigment.”
See a video preview of the exhibit here
The Language of Color is on display until September 6, 2009.
Updated 28 October 2008 21:57 UTC
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Replies
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Just a pedantic question: Is it not a green wavelength that is reflected, rather than a blue wavelength through a yellow filter? It would be counterintuitive if blue is reflected, being that we perceive what is reflected, and we perceive Kermit as green.
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Thanks, really great exhibition, I saw a lot of interesting and unusual things. Although in reality, we are also animals, and also seeing things in a specific perception. We do not see color as such, we see the reflection of waves of specific color spectrum that our eyes accept, nothing more. In fact, things are not as what we see.
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