Today I got the call: "Daddy! There are all kinds of little baby Aquasaurs swimming around in the tank!" (In case you don't know, Aquasaurs are a kind of rehydratable insta-pet kind of prehistoric tadpole shrimp critters that you can raise as a science project. Like Sea Monkeys, but bigger and scarier and cruising the Earth since the Devonian period 350 million years ago. My son got some for Christmas. Get the scoop in my previous Aquasaur post here.)

I raced home and sure enough, there were about dozen or so little, uh, things, each a couple millimeters in length, swimming around in the small plastic tank that came with the Aquasaurs kit. Now this is a big deal, because only a few days ago, they were nothing but dried up little specks of dirt-looking stuff in a foil packet. Now they were little whitish specks paddling merrily through the water. The instructions said that we would have to wait seven to ten days to see anything, but our little guys hatched in four. See, they're overachievers already!

I took a picture, in case you didn't believe me. I know it's not a very good picture—actually it's a terrible one—but it will have to do for now. See that blurry little speck on the left-hand side? That's an Aquasaur. (The trilobytes and Devonian fishes and other things that you see so clearly are only part of the printed background, sorry.)  I circled it so you can see it better, too. Now we just have to feed them and stuff and wait for them to get bigger (up to two inches, including the tail).

More Aquasaur updates as they grow and things get more interesting.