Check Out These Winning Pics of Plants, Fungi, Whales, and Dinosaurs

The runner-up image in the ‘Paleoecology’ category is a microscopic shot of an extracted diplodocid dinosaur blood vessel. The remnants of these cells are about 150 million years old. “Once considered paradoxical, the preservation of fragile soft tissues is now known to be the result of the chemical transformation of original proteins, lipids, and sugars occurring during fossilization – allowing such fragile evidence of past life to survive over millions of years!,” said Jasmina Wiemann, a molecular paleobiologist at Chicago’s Field Museum, and who submitted the image.