Dark Roasted Blend: The Most Surreal Insect on Earth.

The Treehopper “Helicopter” from the Steamy Jungles of your Mind

Sure, Salvador Dali came up with some lovely surreal forms in his art, but this thing blows them all out of the water. Seen in Berlin‘s Museum of Natural History, this is the Brazilian Treehopper, or Bocydium globulare – a real living insect, which only pretends to be an alien helicopter:

(a replica of Bocydium globulare made by Alfred Keller for Berlin’s Naturkundemuseum)

Its other name is “The Bell Bearer”; the “Globulare” part of its Latin moniker stands for these utterly bizarre spheroids on the top (they are not antennae!).

(image credit: Patrick Landmann)

It’s obvious why many people have wondered if Mr. Keller (who did many replicas for Berlin’s Museum of Natural History in the 1950s) did not just come up with this replica from his imagination. It is truly hard to believe that such a thing can exist on Earth. And yet it does, together with other weirdly-shaped Membracids (relative to cicadas), shown below.

(image credit: Nick Currie)

Other insect replicas by Alfred Keller were damaged or lost during the Second World War, but this sculpture was preserved by Berlin’s Naturkundemuseum – a perfect find for modern concept artists and game designers!

We’ve shown you some bizarre insects before (see Best Bugs in the Universe for example), but seeing Bocydium globulare may very well re-define your concepts of what constitutes “weird” in nature:

Dark Roasted Blend: The Most Surreal Insect on Earth. Click here to see more!