Kunstformen der Natur is a book of lithographic and halftone prints by German biologist Ernst Haeckel.
The 8th print, Discomedusae. The center and bottom-center images are Desmonema annasethe; the tentacles reminded Haeckel of his late wife's long flowing hair.
Sea anemone (Actiniae)
Anthomedusa (Anthomedusae)
Siphonophore (Siphonophorae)
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
Ernst Haeckel
Christmas of 1860
In later life
Sea anemones from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (Art forms of Nature) of 1904