biology  chris  chris tomlinson  lucky rat  luckyrat  tomlinson 

The Lucky Rat was born in the 1960's, surrounded by and often squashed by thousands of other rat brothers and sisters. He wanted to experience the world outside of his laboratory cage and one day he got his wish. Sadly, the rest of this article will explain why his luck was short lived. Only his name lives on, as a relatively unique username that I find rather more memorable than chris87614 - after reading the story of the lucky rat you may find it memorable too, if slightly disturbing.

The Lucky Rat is a fortunate rat who was introduced to me at sixth form in a biology lesson by my teacher Mr Deakins. My friend Lucy Stone and I wrote our interpretation of the story of the Lucky Rat and I've copied it verbatim in the main article. Since the Lucky Rat was so great, I decided to adopt his name as my nick name when chatting online. Not all the rats depicted herin survived but none were harmed during the telling of this story.

ARKive.org  biology  chris  chris tomlinson  image  project  tomlinson  video  web design 

Note: This is not the archive of my old projects

ARKive is a unique collection of thousands of videos, images and fact-files illustrating the world's species.

It's a Wildscreen project and as part of the small Wildscreen IT team, I play a key part in developing the ARKive website and keeping it online.

The invisible part of ARKive is equally important as the awareness raising website - we store high quality copies of images and videos in a secure digital vault. This data represents the best visual record of (mostly) endangered species so the world can be sure that there will always be a record of those species, safe from the risk of commercial pressures and failures that so often lead to old photographs and movies being lost forever.

There are currently around 25,000 videos and images of endangered* species which the ARKive media team select from a vast choice in order to preserve those items that best represent the species.

Here are some highlights:

Giant Panda falling from tree

Fennec fox attacking and eating snake

Verreaux's sifaka 'dancing'

Thylacine - last known individual, 1936

Gray's spinner dolphin - overview

* There are some British species that aren't endangered at all but finding media for the IUCN redlist species is our main priority.