Radiolarians

This scene was inspired by the intricate forms found in Radiolaria which I discovered during library research. Their diversity of form is incredible and I've only explored a single avenue in this scene.

“Radiolaria are amoeboid protozoa with many stiff projections supported by microtubules, called axopods, that produce intricate mineral skeletons. They occur as plankton throughout the ocean, and are known as common microfossils from the Cambrian period onwards.”

Taken from the wikipedia entry on Radiolaria

“Radiolarians are single-celled protistan marine organisms that distinguish themselves with their unique and intricately detailed glass-like exoskeletons.”

Florida State Molecular Expressions Gallery

Larger versions

Best quality listed first; although all these images are very high quality, compression artefacts creep in when using JPEGs. No browsers currently support JPEG 2000 images, although many graphics applications do.

1600×1200 true colour PNG file (lossles compression). 1.51 MB (1,588,831 bytes)
1600×1200 true colour JPEG 2000 file (lossey compression, 70%). 270 KB (277,096 bytes)
1600×1200 true colour JPEG file (lossey compression, 20%). 231 KB (237,130 bytes)

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Sample source material