Amazing! Letters of the alphabet on butterfly wings

So, this is actually a few years old, but this was the first time I had seen it. I did a search here and found nothing, but if I overlooked the post, especially considering it's age, please forgive me!

I thought this was really incredible.

Photographer Kjell Sandved traveled to 30 different countries taking pictures of live butterflies and moths to capture these images. He was able to find the English alphabet as well as numbers 0-9 in the patterns on their wings.

Link to article





I think a quote from the photographer himself sums it up quite nicely...

To find beauty in the world, you have to look closely. ” —Kjell Sandved

with all the things that make us worry and fret, that was a nice aside. how amazing and beautiful all life actually is.

reply to post by Lawgiver


It really is. Seeing things like this just make me take a breath and forget for just a minute how frustrating daily life can be. With so many things to worry about sometimes it's nice to just look at the small things.

reply to post by jacktorrance


I read about this but I never looked it up. its cool to finaly see this

Well, that would explain where the idea of letters originated.

reply to post by burntoast


Thanks! Sometimes the images appear for me in the post and other times they don't. I can't figure out what I'm doing differently.

Totally refreshing in a time when the entire recent post page reads 'North Korea did this' 'North Korea said that' 'North Korea, North Korea, North Korea'.

Way too much doom porn these days.

So this was nice. Star and flag for you, OP.

I want to be the guy that asks this.....

No one finds this coincidence a little wild? I mean.... what are the odds that something naturally occuring would depict the alphabet as much as these butterflies does?
Makes you wonder...

Even if the alphabet was invented by some scientist type person back in the day, how on earth would he have been able to observe all the different butterflies in their different areas on Earth?

Wonder why it is an English Alphabet? Any butterflies with other letters or symbols? just curious.

Thanks for this OP Very wild!!

Originally posted by amatrine
Wonder why it is an English Alphabet? Any butterflies with other letters or symbols? just curious.

Exactly.... that is weird, since we know for a fact that the English language derived from other languages.
Why wouldn't it be hieroglyphics, greek or runes?

reply to post by amatrine


I'm not sure. The photog says he specifically went on a search for the english alphabet after discovering the letter "F" on one at the Smithsonian. He also said he has found images that look like faces and things like that, but who knows what we could find if we went out looking!

reply to post by daryllyn


Thanks

reply to post by flice


Trust me, I found this more than a little wild! It kind of blew my mind.

Originally posted by rickymouse
Well, that would explain where the idea of letters originated.

What, like "Oh there's a W, I've been looking for a letter to replace to Us together in a word and call it a double U. I never knew it looked like that." ?

No, the letters of the alphabet are far more interesting to learn about.

I wish we could see the images uncropped, so we could see how the 'letters' fit in with the rest of the wing. As the artist says it took him 24 years to find the letters and numbers. For all we know some of them are part of a larger image that would simply make it hard to see them without the attention to them.

Originally posted by flice
I want to be the guy that asks this.....

No one finds this coincidence a little wild? I mean.... what are the odds that something naturally occuring would depict the alphabet as much as these butterflies does?
Makes you wonder...

And hopefully realise that in 24 years of looking for representation of letters on the backs of bugs, specifically doing this, for 24 years, should yield some results.

And viola - there they are.

Even if the alphabet was invented by some scientist type person back in the day, how on earth would he have been able to observe all the different butterflies in their different areas on Earth?

I'm not going to lie...I wasn't expecting much from the pictures when opening this thread for a look.

But wow, that's absolutely stunning! There is no limit to the beauty found in nature, just astonishing. Thank you for sharing

Originally posted by flice
I want to be the guy that asks this.....

No one finds this coincidence a little wild? I mean.... what are the odds that something naturally occuring would depict the alphabet as much as these butterflies does?
Makes you wonder...

Even if the alphabet was invented by some scientist type person back in the day, how on earth would he have been able to observe all the different butterflies in their different areas on Earth?

You confuse cause and effect with one another.

The more logical conclusion is that the shapes of the letters in our alphabet are common trough out all of nature.
Just last month I pooped out 6 different letters of the alphabet, which is not the best example but these shapes return in the form of lands, rocks, lakes, trees, butterflies you name it.
Besides that more and more evidence is found that we exist in a giant complex maze of mathematical formulas all around us. Our population growth for example can be measured using the fibonacci sequence which also returns in several plantforms and the expansion of the universe itself.

Our prime or first signs of spoken and written language can be traced back as far as ancient Sumeria/Babylon roughly 10.000 BC.
Nature as we know it has been around for millions of years, so our alphabet is probably the result of seeing and recording common and reocurring shapes in nature. Butterflies just happen to be part of nature.

Not as natural and beautiful as the butterflies, but fits in this thread, none the less.....

www.dailymail.co.uk...