Tardigrade

Tardigrades are usually only 0.3 to 0.5 millimetres long as adults, which made a six-foot concrete one an unusual greeter for a museum. The sculpture was installed in front of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane at UC Davis, where UC Davis said it anchors the entrance to the Bohart Museum of Entomology. The museum holds one of the world's largest tardigrade collections, with more than 35,000 glass slide-mounted specimens according to its own tardigrade page.

UC Davis and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources reported that a crew installed the sculpture at 7 a.m. on 3 February 2021 in a half-hour job; a caption on the museum's page dates the installation to 4 February. It is the work of artist Solomon Bassoff of Faducci LLC, North San Juan, who described it as a coated steel armature with pigmented, hand-sculpted concrete and bronze claws. It weighs 2,112 pounds and measures six feet long and nearly three feet high.