https://www.facebook.com/107673331465164/

Ars Selvatica, Wollemi (2026)

01/07/2026

Ars Botanica opens with a “Lazarus species”.

In 1994, David Noble, a park ranger, was exploring a remote gorge in Wollemi National Park, Australia, when he stumbled upon an unfamiliar tree. Its unique bark and fern-like leaves hinted at something extraordinary. This chance encounter led to the discovery of the Wollemi Pine, a species thought to have been extinct for millions of years, a true ‘dinosaur tree’ hidden in plain sight.

The exact location of the wild population is being kept secret to protect it.

⸻

Sources
- IUCN Red List.
- Plants of the World Online.
- NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Downloaded on 01 July 2026.

Credits / Visuals
- Naturalistic illustration reference — Beverly Allen.
- Layout and distribution map — Ars Selvatica, original work.

23/06/2026

Today’s Ars Bestiaria animal card fetch deeper to the Steven’s swellshark, Cephaloscyllium stevensi.

Its story begins not with a dramatic encounter, but with a trap set for another ancient animal: Nautilus. From that deep-water gear, off eastern Papua New Guinea, came five adult swellsharks unlike the others — enough for Clark and Randall to name a new species in 2011.

Known from the Bismarck Sea and from depths where human presence is still accidental.

⸻

Sources

* IUCN Red List.
* Clark & Randall, 2011.
* FishBase.

Credits / Visuals

* Naturalistic illustration reference — Ars Selvatica reconstruction from species reference imagery.
* Layout and distribution map — Ars Selvatica, original work

19/06/2026

This week’s Ars Selvatica animal card follows the heavy, relentless footprints of the Komodo dragon.

For the Ata Modo of Komodo Island, the dragon is not only an animal of the dry volcanic hills. It is Sebae, “the other half”.

Across Komodo, Rinca, Gili Motang, Nusa Kode, Padar, and the western and northern coasts of Flores, humans have shared earth with dragons in a way Western fantasy could only later imagine.

And yet, there is a strange visual silence.

Island Southeast Asia holds some of the oldest known painted traces of human imagination: ochre handprints, therianthropes, Sulawesi warty pigs, babirusas, anoas, and Bornean banteng. But the Komodo dragon, so central to local cosmology, seems absent from the secure prehistoric rock-art record.

I keep thinking of the wolf in European Palaeolithic art: not absent, but startlingly rare. Perhaps some beings were too close to be drawn.

To Western science, the Komodo dragon arrived late: rumours in 1910, a formal name in 1912. It entered modernity just as palaeontology, lost-world fiction, colonial expeditions, and early cinema were teaching Europe and America to dream of surviving monsters.

⸻

Sources
* IUCN Red List.
* Reptile Database.
* IUCN. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Downloaded on 19 June 2026.

Credits / Visuals
* Naturalistic illustration reference — Indonesian stamp.
* Layout and distribution map — Ars Selvatica, original work.

09/05/2026

Long live those who celebrate life. 🌏

08/05/2026

What birthday wishes can one offer to a man like this?

To understand the scale of Sir David Attenborough’s legacy, we have to place him in time.

He was born 100 years ago, into a world where the relationship between humans and nature was profoundly different from the one we know today. Trophy hunting was celebrated. Expeditions often meant collecting, killing, and possessing. Animals were merely divided into prey, threats, curiosities to display, or livestock to be used.

Even the Amazon rainforest was still imagined as a remote untamed wilderness to be conquered, bent, and forced into submission. Few could have imagined that, one day, art of humanity would be campaigning to prevent its destruction.

The fascination for life, and the awareness of its uniqueness and fragility, were enlightened ideas shaped by people like him.

With every journey, every exploration, every documentary, Sir David helped teach generations not only to look at nature, but to recognise its wonder, its vulnerability, and its irreplaceable value.

And perhaps, more than anything, he taught his devoted public that we are not meant to wait passively for the world to change. We are meant to help move it. Toward the life we believe is worth living.

Happy 100th birthday, Sir David Attenborough.

ArsSelvatica ArsCustodia

——

Sources
Killifish Conservation Project.;
Lehr & von May, Zootaxa, 2015.;
Gillespie et al.
Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.;
NHM, London.;
National Geographic, 2026.;
IUCN.

Wikipedia used as a general index for cross-checking names and dates.

——

Credits
N. attenboroughi — F. Casado.
P. attenboroughi — Lehr & von May / ZooKeys.
Z. attenboroughi relative — imago images / Ardea.
C. attenboroughi — Rodolfo Nogueira.
P. attenboroughi — Martin Whiting / Paulbester_scorps.
M. attenboroughi — Peter Schouten.
N. attenboroughii — SG / Elfika.
A. tau — ©️ The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.
A. conybeari — Gabriel N. U. / Mark Witton.
Sir David Attenborough with camera — BBC.

All diagrams and layout graphics — Ars Selvatica original work.

01/04/2026

A new Spinosaurus just dropped, and I’m not convinced it’s a new species.

Scattered fragments. Mostly subadult cranial material. A crest that could still fall within age, s*x, or ordinary variation.
Same river-fauna; a different locality, yes, but that may simply point to a wider range, intraspecific variability, or even s*xual dimorphism.

⸻

Sources
Sereno, P. C., Vidal, D., Myhrvold, N. P., et al. (2026). Scimitar-Crested Spinosaurus species from the Sahara caps stepwise spinosaurid radiation.
Angst, D., Barnoud, J., Cornette, R., Chinsamy, A. S*x and Ontogenetic Variation in the Crest of Numida meleagris: Implications for Crested Vertebrates.
⸻

Credits / Visuals
• Jenguebi dig site, Farak Formation (Niger) — Matthew Irving / Fossil Lab, University of Chicago
• Fossilized head crests of S. mirabilis — Daniel Vidal / Fossil Lab, University of Chicago
• Paul Sereno with reconstructed S. mirabilis skull (Fossil Lab) — Keith Ladzinski / Handout via Reuters
• Reconstructed skulls (Fossil Lab) — Keith Ladzinski / Fossil Lab, University of Chicago
• Digital skeletal reconstruction (S. mirabilis) — University of Chicago
• S. aegyptiacus vs S. mirabilis skulls — © Keith Ladzinski
• Map graphic — University of Chicago website
• “Spinosaurus with contemporaneous taxa” — artwork by ; article by Jamale Ijouiher; additional render (S. aegyptiacus) by Gustavo Monroy-Becerril
• Flesh rendering & layout — Dani Navarro; adult skull cast — Fossil Lab; helmeted guineafowl images — Todd Green
• Reference fan reconstructions — Spinosaurus 2026: CisioPurple; 1910, 2000, 2010, 2020

21/03/2026

There are places where economics and logistics become so intense that, collectively, we choose to trade away the ecosystems they hold in exchange for the illusion of greater returns. War and strategic interests only reinforce that illusion.

In doing so, we forget that every habitat is unique, and that its value is immeasurably greater than any operation we impose upon it. The Strait of Hormuz is widely known as the narrow passage through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil moves, a strategic corridor constantly framed through threat, pressure, and control.

But beneath that surface narrative lies another world, made of highly adapted organisms that were already living at the edge of tolerance long before humans made survival there even harder. This infographic is about that overlooked ecology: the life of a chokepoint.

ArsSelvatica ArsItinera

⸻
Credits:

-UK Admiralty Charts: The Arabian Gulf].
London, published at the Admiralty, 1967.
-Dugong illustration:

All diagrams and layout graphics — Ars Selvatica original work

⸻
Sources:

-U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) — World Oil Transit Chokepoints; Short-Term Energy Outlook
-Encyclopaedia Britannica — Strait of Hormuz; How does the geography of the Strait of Hormuz affect its role in global shipping?
-Sheppard, C. et al. — The Gulf: a young sea in decline (Marine Pollution Bulletin)
-Reuters — reporting on recent disruptions, war-risk insurance, rerouting, and shipping pressure in the Strait of Hormuz

19/03/2026

Can humanity emancipate itself from violence and destruction?

As the air grows ever thicker with increasingly nauseating scenarios, and as the ruling class, over the last decade, has seen its representatives replaced by figures ever more impious, practically overtly installed by economic interests grounded in models an entire generation believed it had begun to leave behind, the eternal question returns to torment us with anguished fury.

If Homo sapiens has existed for roughly 300,000 years, and the Neolithic system of land ownership and resource control that still structures our societies emerged only around 12,000 years ago, then what we call “civilization” occupies only a narrow sliver of human time.
Perhaps it should not be treated as the inevitable endpoint of evolution, but as an historical experiment whose consequences are becoming increasingly calamitous, and whose course we need to correct if we are to use our divine technology not to sabotage and dispossess one another, but to engineer a shared paradise.

⸻

Sources:
- López-Montalvo, E. (2015). Violence in Iberian Neolithic rock art. Antiquity.
- Mirazón Lahr et al. (2021). Interpersonal violence at Jebel Sahaba. Scientific Reports.
- Rascón et al. (2023). Large-scale violence in Late Neolithic Europe. Scientific Reports.
- Gutiérrez-Zugasti et al. (2024). Neolithic archery from Cueva de los Murciélagos. Scientific Reports.

⸻

Credits:
- Healed rib (Catalan Pyrenees) — Maria D. Guillén
- Excavations at Roc de les Orenetes — IPHES-CERCA
-Excavations at Jebel Sahaba (Photo: Wendorf Archive, British Museum)
- Levantine rock art depictions (Cova Remígia, Les Dogues, El Cerrao, Cañada de la Cruz) — Porcar Ripollés et al.; Obermaier & Breuil archives
- Mass grave imagery — San Juan ante Portam Latinam excavation documentation - Battle scene rock art — Lajoux, Tassili n’Ajjer documentation
- Ethnographic image (Papua warriors) —

All diagrams and layout graphics — Ars Selvatica (original work)

13/03/2026

The geology of some lands is so striking and evocative that it can almost seem to “justify” deforestation, simply to make it more visible. Worse: it creates a landscape so spectacular it can look like its natural, inevitable state.

Central–southern Sicily is shaped by the Gessoso-Solfifera Series: a package of evaporitic rocks deposited during the Messinian (5.96–5.33 million years ago, late Miocene), when the Mediterranean went through repeated phases of evaporation and partial refilling. In increasingly isolated basins, concentrated waters precipitated gypsum first, then more saline layers, and locally sulfur-bearing deposits.

In these images you can read its faces: selenitic gypsum in large crystals composing the soft, easily eroded hills, grooved wrinkled clay slopes, and the tougher, bristling limestone ridges rising like ancient ruins.

A landscape that seems bare by destiny, but it’s bare by the history of its occupation.

🎵 Soundscape: “Kaytagi” — performed by Alfio Antico. A raw, percussive ritual pulse, carried by frame drums and voice: earthbound, ancestral.

🎧 Find it in Ars Selvatica’s Notes de Voyage — Sonu Siculu

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3EL0CquKWCCfyFTzSepJdE?si=EiYTKDDQR3mbYQecM0_vCA

Credits:
Ars Selvatica own archives.

AlfioAntico Geology SedimentaryRock

Ars Selvatica

01/07/2026

23/06/2026

19/06/2026

09/05/2026

08/05/2026

01/04/2026

21/03/2026

19/03/2026

13/03/2026

Address

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Listing takedown request