Metallic-green is most frequently displayed by beetles, but other metallic colors are also observed - blue, red, gold, silver, and purple.  Why do bugs have the ability to display iridescent colors while mammals have only shades of brown or black?  A beetle's body is a thick cuticle comprised of multiple laminated layers of thin-film chitin with sometimes a crystal lattice microstructure that refract and polarize light-waves. 

Dark-red cones with green leaves provide irrefutable evidence that bristlecone pines are celebrating the miracle of life yet another year.  This event, the equivalent of a woman thousands of years old giving birth, confounds the claim that an organism's life-span is limited due to progressive shortening of its DNA telomeres.  Gnarled and bent, bristlecone pines are the world's oldest living organisms.

Black "tear-marks" streak from each eye down to the solemn mouth.  This is how you distinguish spotted cheetahs from leopards or jaguars.  Tear-marks are but one of many characteristics that make cheetahs unique among other Felidae.  The only big cat that hunts during the day, the cheetah depends upon its sharp eye sight to spot prey and predators.  The black streaks aid in reducing sun-glare. 

Blue mystery: What is older than a billion years, originally the size of a golf ball, as rare as 1 in 22 million, carries a curse, and was stolen from Marie-Antoinette?  What once belonged to French, Russian, and British royalty and an American heiress who offered it as ransom in 1932 for the kidnapped Lindbergh baby?  What arrived wrapped in a plain brown paper bag at the Smithsonian Institute in 1958 through U.S. registered mail, insured for $1 million?  Yes: it is the Hope diamond. 

Red-orange tongues of fire blaze from its mouth like a flame-thrower.  Witnesses recount seeing one (or several) green (or orange-red) serpents writhing in the sky.  Others describe a long, serpentine body with leathery bat-like wings and multiple heads each disgorging fire.  As the monster flies across the sky, a loud hissing is heard and smoking-hot scales rain down. 

Yellow daffodils nod their trumpet-shaped blooms knowingly and whisper: "the equinox is here, spring is coming!"  Not all daffodils are yellow; however, some are white, orange, red, or lime-green with nuanced shades in between.  Daffodils are classified by the shape of their central corona and surrounding perianth.  Fifty different species are identified with more than 26,000 cultivars recorded in the International Daffodil Register.

White cat-sized shadows trail a polar bear stalking its prey.  When the bear has eaten its fill, they dart in to devour the remains, carefully avoiding becoming the bear's dessert.  Weighing only 6 to 11 pounds, these shadows are arctic foxes called Alopex (fox) lagopus (the hare-footed) for their fur-covered foot pads, resembling "bunny slippers," that insulate against frost when they dig the snow for lemmings - their favorite snack.

Marble columns rise 34 feet upward - pristine, lustrous, spare, and bulging.  Bulging?  Each of the 46 columns surrounding the Parthenon - the pinnacle of architectural perfection in the Western world - have extruding waistlines.  The steps leading up to the 23,000-square-foot temple display a decidedly imperfect upward curvature.  Close inspection reveals no absolute straight lines on the Parthenon.

Green, pink, orange, yellow, blue, brown - despite all the colors and flavors of the rainbow to choose from, we pick plain-old vanilla as our favorite every time.  Americans have loved ice cream - 90% consume the product - ever since Dolley Madison served it at her husband's second inaugural in 1813.  President Ronald Reagan even designated July as "National Ice Cream Month."  Nearly 200 years of ice cream science informs the quality of today's products.

Mauve stinger may not conjure up the intense terror of Wind Viper or Fire Dragon - names of marauding Viking ships - but for the victims along the coast of Northern Ireland the night of November 21, 2007 the devastation was equal to any inflicted by the dread Norsemen of the Dark Ages.  Billions of Pelagia noctiluca comprising an enormous 10-square-mile armada 35 feet deep executed an unprecedented attack on a salmon farm north of Belfast. 

Rich-orange bills serve male puffins as extravagant displays calculated to dazzle females into believing they have the wherewithal to be handsome providers.  Despite their usual sober black and white attire, these jaunty little seabirds project a comical appearance.  Yet, there is nothing humorous about their marginal life in the North Pacific (or Atlantic).

Yellow-dyed silk robes were so precious to ancient Chinese emperors that they permitted no one else to wear them.  These emperors also limited silk-wearing to the nobility, assigning certain colors in accordance with their rank.  Confucius attributed the Chinese empress Xi Ling-Shi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Ling-Shi) with discovering silk weaving approximately 2640 BCE.  For the next 2,000 years, silk farming and dyeing remained a guarded secret in China.  

Beet-red is a common English expression derived from the annoying characteristic of beet-root cells to "leak," staining nearby objects a dark red-purple.  The staining-agents are betanin and other betalain pigments.  Many Americans dislike beets.  "They taste like dirt" is a common complaint, but Australians and New Zealanders wouldn't think of eating their burgers without generous toppings of pickled beet-root.