This was no ordinary bird. SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory photographer Brad Plummer knew his time with the precious Achaeopteryx thermopolis fossil would be short, so he made the best of it:

It surprised me to see the Archaeopteryx fossil arrive at the lab with such nonchalance–the two scientists pulled up in a dusty truck with it on the backseat wrapped in foam in a wooden box. I knew the best time to get the shot would be the instant the case came open, before it was mounted for the experiment. I had pre-arranged access to the fossil for a few minutes, although once the lid came off a scrum of onlookers crowded me as I tried to work. This would be the last chance for anyone to photograph the fossil, with nothing between lens and bone, for a long, long time.

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Exhibition model makers working to fit sculptor John Gurche’s life-sized recreation of Lucy onto the model tree in the Lucy diorama section of the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian museum in Washington. Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) was discovered in Hadar, Ethiopia in 1974 by Donald Johanson and Maurice Taieb. Lucy was nicknamed that very night as Donald Johanson’s team celebrated to the Beatles’ hit “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Her Ethiopian name, “Dinenesh,” is Amharic for “you are beautiful.”

Courtesy Chip Clark/Smithsonian Institution

David Hanson’s robots are by now somewhat familiar faces, including his Einstein robot currently being used as a research tool at Javier Movellan’s Machine Perception Lab at UCSD, and the punk rock conversationalist Joey Chaos. A less familiar face is that of Bina Rothblatt, the blonde at the end of the table in the above photograph. Bina is a robot commissioned by Sirius Satellite Radio inventor Martine Rothblatt to look like her beloved wife. Take that, uncanny valley!

Photographer Timothy Archibald and I worked closely on this project with the idea of creating portraits, and maybe a kind of family portrait, of the Hanson robots. After flying to Texas to shoot Hanson and robots at his home and workshop in Dallas, Texas, Archibald wrote to me.

“Here is a big house in a Texas suburb that looks normal on the outside. On the inside it is robot making company made up of a floating array of 9-12 employees sculpting things, working on the electrical stuff and writing code for software…taking over the living room, den, kitchen, etc. On the upstairs level is where Hanson, his wife and 3 year old live. They they are in month three of this arrangement. There is no down time. People trickle in at 11:00 AM and stay until 1-3 AM everyday including weekends. They are cranking right now, trying to hit deadlines with The Android Portrait of Bina Rothblatt as well as a potential consumer robot called ZENO. Curiously, Hanson’s son is also named Zeno. There is a story on how that came to be, of course…”

To see more photography from this story, check out DISCOVER magazine’s May 2010 issue on newsstands now.

Katherine Batiste of Hanson Robotics working on a computer with “An Android Portrait Of Bina Rothblatt” sits on the table.