Mini of the Week

Tardigrades, known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets, are a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals. They were first described by the German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773, who called them little water bears. In 1777, the Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani named them Tardigrada, which means “slow steppers”.And they are so cute!

2 x single piece resin tardigrades. They are 28-32mm long and about 15mm tall. Some ideas of the scale are shown in the extra photos in the gallery above (click any image next to the main one). As the real beasties are microscopic, these minis don’t really have a “scale” per se!

Sculpted by Ristul