Some people find Dr. Martin Oeggerli’s monsters a little frightening. I see beauty in them, perfectly shaped by evolution. I also see a hint of Charles Darwin and Albrecht Dürer: the scientist and the artist.

Mites don’t have a particularly nice reputation, but how well do we really know them?

Oeggerli wants to help us to see past our preconceptions and beyond the limits of our own eyes. With a scanning electron microscope (SEM), he explores the microcosmos—the tiny, unseen world that’s smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. There he finds exotic creatures with endless forms of evolutionary specialization. These creatures are perfectly adapted to their environment, by their environment.

When Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859