PORTFOLIO A Library of Lungs 1/4

About the images

When Carsten Kamenz of Berlin's Humboldt-University turned his electron microscope on arachnid "book lungs," he found a landscape of sere, alien beauty—canyons and beaches of chitin that, at higher magnifications, split into thin pages fringed with lacy arches and carpeted with mushroom-like structures. Resolving a longstanding conflict, Kamenz's studies confirmed three years ago that book lungs evolved from gills only a single time in the ancestors of arachnids.