If you’re a natural history fan and have been online at all this week, chances are you’ve seen photographer Nick Brandt’s stunning photos of mummified birds and bats along the shores of Tanzania’s Lake Natron. The gloomy images make the lake look like a living museum where animals fall into the water and immediately turn to stone. But as Brandt himself has noted, the images are more art than science, and these pictures obscure the resiliency of life in and around the lake.

As Brandt told New Scientist and other news sources, he collected the dead animals and posed them on their dark perches. The