#TrilobiteTuesday is also #TraceFossilTuesday with a lovely pair of overlapping traces: the trilobite resting trace Rusophycus appears to capture the moment it slurped a burrowing worm out ofvthe mud like spaghetti. ⚒️🧪
Dave Rodland
@daverodland.bsky.social
Underemployed necromancer. 🧪⚒️🦪🌊☠️ Geoscience educator, paleo/sed prof somehow talked into trying on the min/pet hat. Living in the past and talking to dead things since the late Holocene. ❤️☮️⚖️ Opinions mine & do not reflect those of my employers.
If you didn't love them enough already, there's at least one species documented to live and hunt cooperatively in matriarchal family groups!
c0nc0rdance@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 4mo agoVelvet worms shoot rapid-hardening glue at their prey (other invertebrates). Within seconds, the sprayed liquid hardens to plastic-like consistency, trapping or slowing the target. This marvelous glue has possible human applications in recyclable bioplastics & surgical sutures that dissolve.
When we don't adequately fund public universities, and instead force students to take out loans, what we as a society are really doing is borrowing money from the younger generation—their hard-earned future income—to fund a necessary project that benefits us all: building an educated society.
Mark Copelovitch@mcopelov.bsky.social · 2d ago1. This is bullsh*t & an epically stupid policy completely detached from any empirical evidence: bsky.app/profile/mcop... 2. We could simply avoid this entire issue by <all together now> Funding. The. Damn. Public. Universities. Like. We. Used. To: bsky.app/profile/mcop...
This sounds like the kind of shop stories @laurasita.bsky.social used to send from McMurdo, except less creepy, more plausible, and with a substantially lower number of Lovecraftian eldritch horrors.
Alison Robin@alisonrobin.com · 2d agoThe only people funding Antarctic expeditions anymore are private investors from old money who belong to weird social societies. These rich guys are just obsessed with recreating some expedition from the 30's that only found a couple fossils. I don't get it.
Something boring for #MolluskMonday ... the predatory gastropod Cyclonema and some of its victims, the brachiopod Rafinesquina. 🧪⚒️🐌
It never hurts to ask, unless of course you are asking to get an anvil dropped on your toe.
Some large productid brachiopods for #FossilFriday ⚒️🧪 While most brachiopods tend towards the small side for benthic invertebrates, often just a few mm to cm, late Paleozoic productids could get relatively large. There's a good case for the bizarre reef-forming taxa being photosymbiotic.
I dreamed I was holding the perfect, intact head of the Ordovician armored fish Astraspis desiderata ... but all I've got is the plushie.
Colorado Corgi lovers, help a friend find a forever home for an adorable potato?
laurasita@laurasita.bsky.social · 5d agoWhy has my perfect foster son not received any adoption applications? If you live in Colorado and need Corgi in your life, he will bring you joy every single day. His name is Copper! Adoptable Dogs | Corgisandfriends share.google/nlvXhJ5K0pFQ...
Film you’ve watched more than six times Hard Mode : No Star Trek, Star wars, LOTR, any Marvel, Disney or Ghibli
Delicatessen: Dominique Pinon's Head
Alt: Delicatessen: Dominique Pinon's Head
static.klipy.com
James Petruzzi@hawaiianimages.bsky.social · 7d agoFilm you’ve watched more than six times Hard Mode : No Star Trek, Star wars, LOTR, any Marvel, Disney or Ghibli
Stay for the marine biology trivia, but come for the inappropriate jokes in the comments! There's got to be a harpoon reference someone can stick in there somewhere...
jordan@jordantyranny.bsky.social · last wk.The only taxidermied blue whale in the world, 1865 CE, now housed at the Natural History Museum in Sweden. The public was allowed to enter the whale up until a couple was found having sex inside it. Now the whale’s jaws are opened only for special occasions, such as Swedish election days.
Just a quick cuttlefish for #MolluskMonday 🧪🦑 Fun fact, cephalopods generally can't perceive color but cuttlefish eyes are adapted to detect light polarization. It is unclear whether this is more help or hindrance in their investigation of optical mineralogy.
I missed #MolluskMonday this week, so #FossilFriday is doing double duty with a small inoceramid. These bivalves could grow well over a meter across in the Cretaceous Interior Seaway, and it is generally suspected that they harbored some variety of sulfur metabolizing bacteria as chemosymbiotes. ⚒️🧪🦪
THISTHREAD 🧪⚒️ I've taught geology so many places, and while there's more to it, this captures the disjunction between 'elite' research oriented faculty and the realities of keeping Geology sustainable, from the perspective of people who understand the importance of teaching it to everyone.
Brandon Bishop@brandontbishop.bsky.social · 2w agoWait. There are seriously geo faculty that do not understand that the general "intro to geology" course is vitally important to their department's recruiting/funding, the field propagating itself, and *the educated public knowing anything about geology and earth sciences*?
All right, gang ... looks like I'm (adjunct) teaching Mineralogy for the first time this fall! I'm rusty (or is that goethite?) I've dug up my Crys/Min notes and have tabs full of NAGT resources open on my laptop, but hit me with your favorite resources, approaches and best practices! 🪨⚒️🔬
NWS confirms that an EF1 🌪 tornado touched down directly across the route I had planned to travel to help with a library event on paleontology. At about the time I would have been in the touchdown zone, if I hadn't listened to warnings and called in to postpone. Listen to the warnings, kids.
If you are interested in a non-technical summary of our recent paper on how Cretaceous monsoons, tropical cyclones and tides created the exceptional Villaggio del Pescatore dinosaur fossil site, check out this piece I wrote for @theconversation.com: 🦖🌪️ theconversation.com/storms-that-...
Storms that built a graveyard: ancient monsoons created a spectacular dinosaur fossil site
A new study has found that layers in the rock record days, not years, representing storms.
theconversation.com
Some badass Egyptian princesses to read about with your Sunday morning coffee.
Bronwyn Isaacs@find-bronwyn.bsky.social · 3w ago"buried with a powerful arsenal of weapons . . . which archaeologists have continued to dismiss as "purely symbolic" But. . . "evidence the princesses knew how to use them, based on the state of the muscle attachments on their bones, and the signs of injuries" www.sciencealert.com/ancient-egyp...
Hey Siri, show me a system that looks to filter out the scientific discoveries of women with seniority. The paper confirms the hostility many of us feel is baked into the editorial & peer review community (sitting behind a veil of anonymity) that prefer to see papers led by women thrown out.
Javi Ibarrondo@jibarrondo.bsky.social · 3w agoEditorial and peer review dynamics at elite general science journals | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧪
Some graptolites for #FossilFriday ⚒️🧪 While the convention has been to call these a long-extinct group of colonial pelagic hemichordates that died out at the end of the Paleozoic, the living pterobranch Rhabdopleura seems close enough to be considered the last of their kind. Like tuataras.
When we said "the world is on fire," maybe we should've remembered the stupid script writers take everything literally these days. There is no subtle foreshadowing in this timeline, only invocation.
This piece heavily quotes my colleague David Jeffery, the last geology prof at Marietta College (a small liberal arts school with an international reputation for their petroleum engineering program). If he's worried, I'm worried. Ohio has built quite an industry in wastewater injection.
David DeWitt@daviddewitt.bsky.social · 3w agoWashington County residents are raising concerns that injection wells in southeastern Ohio leaking brine waste will eventually pollute Marietta’s drinking water ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/07/14/t...
I'm writing a gay romance about terrane collision, subduction and orogeny. It's called Accreted Rivalry.
Dr. Tessa Fisher@tessafisher.bsky.social · 3w agoI'm writing a gay romance about rival shepherds It's called Bleated Rivalry
It's #TrilobiteTuesday and old friends sent me this after a visit to the Field Museum, so I guess I'm obliged to share? Or visit again, whatever. Apparently the Pokémon fossil exhibit is really good too.
Employers EXPECT AND PREFER ON-THE-JOB TRAINING "AS long as they have the degree and they understand the language, anything is trainable." "In some respects we prefer [providing training]... We like to teach them our way of doing stuff."