Photo by Shivanparusnath. Image source: Wikimedia Commons
What do you get when science and Tolkien unite? Absolutely amazing nods to a titan of the fantasy world! The handsome reptile you see above might not have heaps of gold to protect, but it did capture the imagination of scientist Ed Stanley, who named it Smaug Gigantus after the famous literary dragon in The Hobbit.
This giant girdled lizard can be found in South Africa, dwelling in the Drakensberg mountain range. It has tough upper armor and a weaker underbelly, not unlike Smaug himself. You can read a bit more about it here.
Fascinated, Katie and I took to the interwebs to see how many more scientists were Tolkien fans. As it turns out, quite a lot!
Image source: Orchid Roots
This is the Dracula smaug orchid, discovered by Mario Portilla in Ecuador. And just in case you are wondering, “Dracula” is not a second literary reference. Dracula translates into “little dragon,” matching the appearance of the various orchids in this genus. You can read more about them here.
The adventure doesn’t stop there. In Tolkien Gateway, we found a massive listings of wasps, plants, moths, mammals, beetles, and more! Behold the Gollum shark!
Slender smoothhound, Gollum attenuatus (Garrick, 1954), collected 18 December 1953, Off Kahu Rocks, Wairarapa, New Zealand. CC BY 4.0. Te Papa (P.001509). Original image from the Museum of New Zealand
And the hairy-footed moss forest bat, otherwise known as the Syconycteris hobbit!
Image source: Zoo Chat
Or how about the Myloplus sauron, a close relative of the piranha? You can read a little more about the discovery and naming of the fish here!
Image source: Wikipedia
The full Tolkien Gateway list can be found here, and we invite you to spend a happy afternoon conducting image searches of the various species. Don’t miss the Spaeleoleptes gimli spider! And if you’d like some further fun reading, look no further than this Mental Floss post! And hats off to Pensoft blog for the absolute best blog title (and awesome photos of the Idiopyrgus eowynae and Idiopyrgus meriadoci).
Now decorate the outside of your house! We offered construction paper, 
The final piece of the project is the spinning cylinder. This is a plastic cup attached to the roof of the house with a brass fastener. Two tabs extend from the top of the box, allowing you to easily turn the mechanism:
Our tabs were created with a 0.75″ x 3″ snippet of poster board. Punch a hole in the center, then thread a brass fastener through the hole. Push the ends of the fastener through small slits cut in the top of the box and the bottom of a plastic cup. Unfold the fastener’s prongs inside the cup.
Finally, wrap your strip of ocean critters around the cup. As you can see in the above photo, the cup is tapered, so the strip won’t wrap around it in a perfect circle. No problem! So long as the strip is secured tightly to one point of the cup (we suggest the strip’s seam) it will work. Here’s a shot of the finished mechanism, which is then tucked inside the house. Secure the lid down with tape.
Ready to see this little contraption in action? The colors were a little muted in the video, so I removed the blue cellophane from the window to showcase the ocean critters more clearly. Swim my little friends, swim!
After spotting the fabulous upside down goldfish ghost 
To make the marionette, trim the outside perimeters off 2 paper plates. Use marker to draw eyes, a mouth, and scales on the plates.Next, tape a white construction paper tail and fins to the inside of 1 plate.