First, we brought you RoboZoo. And while mechanical animals are cool, we still love paper. So we rounded up an ark-full of origami bears, birds and bugs.

Wildlife biologist Bernie Peyton has been working with origami for more than 50 years, almost as long as he’s been interested in conservation. Peyton, who has a doctorate in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley, wants to enliven environmental issues for the masses, and origami, he says, appeals to people of all ages.

“I write a lot of boring [academic] articles nobody reads, but conservation also has to appeal to the emotional side,” Peyton told Wired. “That’s why I do art.”

He chose origami because its fragility complements “the ephemeral nature of our world,” he said.  Plus, he uses his experience as a field biologist to inform how he molds paper into cacti, bears, kangaroo rats, snakes and polar bears, all of which he’s spent considerable time with.

“I don’t fold anything I don’t have a personal experience with,” he said.

“The decades I spent as a field biologist enabled me to breath life into my own creations,” he writes on his website.

He recently showcased some of his creations during the Bay Area Science Festival Nov. 1 and 2 at a gallery in Berkeley. Enjoy.

He attributes some of his proficiency to his math degree, saying origami isn’t just art, it’s also science.

“The rules of what you can do with a single square of paper are fixed,” he says. “It’s not just a case of putting brush to paper and letting your imagination run riot.”

Hunt is taking his creations to the wider world. In October, he exhibited some large-scale versions at the London MCM Expo and Comic Con, and he’s seeking a publisher for a book. But he’s sharing some of his designs already, through his website and on YouTube. He’s not the only one out there doing it — Chris Alexander of starwarsorigami.com just released a book — but Hunt’s designs veer toward the more complicated and intricate. He recommends them for intermediate to advanced origami artists, but that didn’t stop us fromtrying our inept hands at the Naboo Starfighter.

X-wing

What else but the X-wing could have been Hunt’s first origami starfighter? He began with the base from a traditional origami frog, and took the ship through three iterations before settling on the version pictured. He’s also offered step-by-step instructions to building the first edition (see steps 1-17 below).

“The use of the colored side of the paper to form the stripe on the wings was more luck than judgement,” he adds.

Everybody’s favorite droid makes an appearance in Hunt’s gallery, of course. (If C-3PO is your favorite droid, you’re doing it wrong.) Hunt went so far as to bring this little R2 unit to the 2012 London Film and Comic Con, where it had the chance to meet Kenny Baker, the actor who played the little droid.

While some of Hunt’s easier designs can be made in 15 minutes, R2-D2 can take up to two hours — a long time for a form that’s based off a paper square draped over his finger. But it’s not just a crumpled tube; Hunt used precise geometrical patterns to pleat the body, align the holo projector and utility tool, and lock the whole thing down.

The crease pattern for Hunt’s AT-AT walker is available on his page, but to the non-initiated, it looks like a mess of square and diagonal lines. It’s more of a reference for Hunt than a how-to, but he uses blue and red lines to indicate “mountain” and “valley” folds, respectively.

“To recreate one of my designs, I start by pre-creasing the paper in all the right places, and then try and collapse the paper into the model’s base, which can be a very frustrating process, involving clothes pegs, an extra pair of hands, and a lot of patience,” Hunt says. “But once you get enough of the base into position, it reaches a critical mass and the rest can just fall into place naturally.”

The challenge in creating Solo’s ride was hitting the right proportions for the cockpit and the satellite dish, says Hunt. He wound up feeding a flap from the bottom up through the model, in order to get the dish on top.