SO BEAUTIFUL: Amazon River Stingrays

The point of this post really is just this image, which is so beautiful I've been staring at it now for days. Tis an X-ray of a new species of freshwater stingray discovered earlier this month in the Amazon River in Peru. Struggle as we might to create beauty ourselves, we'll never top nature, most particularly the soggier side of it that exists in water.

There were in fact two new species of ray discovered, Heliotrygon gomesi and Heliotrygon rosai, both of which it seems are quite unusual in that they don't have stingers. Which makes me wonder why the heck they're being classified as stingrays… but hey, I'm not a biologist. I assume these guys know what they're doing.

In case you're thinking it's the X-ray creating the beauty here, I will note too that nature is perfectly capable of creating such images without the help of our technology.

Exhibit B: A fossil of a stingray