Norm Douglas

@ringstem.bsky.social

Botanist and educator. Personal account.

This is probably a minor thing to fixate on in the whole mess of nonsense that was Jurassic World: Rebirth, but I can't get over the Dunkleosteus head pulled up by fisherman in the beginning. Where the hell did inGen or whoever get its DNA from? 🧵 1/

A still from Jurassic World: Rebirth showing the head of a Dunkleosteus on top of a pile of normal-sized fish. We're looking at it mouth-first, and its jaws are almost as big across as the man standing next to it. They're also filled with huge irregular "teeth" (actually bony projections of the armored plates that cover the front part of its body).

"If you don't know anything, you don't have a problem." Measuring biodiversity and ecosystem health is crucial to knowing how rapidly decline is taking place and if anything we are doing is helping to mitigate our impact. If this passes, we will be flying blindly into oblivion.

Meade Krosby@meadekrosby.bsky.social · last yr.

The USGS Ecosystems Mission Area (EMA) leads federal research on species & ecosystems and houses the Climate Adaptation Science Centers. OMB spokesperson to NPR: EMA is "obviously irrelevant to science and is exactly the kind of waste President Trump ran on rooting out of the federal government."

NEW: DeSantis directed the University of Florida to cancel a nearly-complete search for its next dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences — because the governor believed the finalists were not in alignment with the state's opposition to DEI

U. of Florida Calls Off Dean Search After DeSantis Intervenes

A spokesperson said the governor’s office stepped in after a right-wing group posted videos of the finalists on social media and claimed they were “radical progressives with disdain for Florida’s DEI ...

chronicle.com

Quote post with a picture you took in a National Park. Some UF Biology students who journeyed from Florida to study the biodiversity of the desert southwest- here completing an incredible hike of Arch Canyon, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. This class doesn’t happen w/o our public lands!

UF Desert Biodiversity immersion course at Organ Pipe.
Matt Johnson, PhD@mossmatters.bsky.social · last yr.

Quote post with a picture you took in a National Park. Team of grad and undergrad researchers collecting plants at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, to study changes in plant genetics and ecophysiology over the 50 years since the Park opened. May 2024. (see also my profile picture)

The point is this: Scientists are accused of being partisan. I say embrace it. We're not lying for political reasons. We are defending science as a way of knowing, and as a humanitarian endeavor to help even those groups that are disenfranchised by people in power. If that's partisan so be it.

So it turns out that compared to centralized distribution of digital information on the web, printed material in libraries provided a kind of distributed defense against the casual whims of an authoritarian government aiming to rewrite history.

Imagine if you're a graduate student who knows they are funded on a federal grant, but doesn't understand the distinction between disbursed and undisbursed funds. You might reasonably think you won't get paid next week even if there is a year or more of your support in a university account already.

Ethan White@ethanwhite.weecology.org · 2y ago

If you run a university research lab please reach out to your folks today to explain any impacts the OMB grant pause memo will have on them, both short-term (will they get paid next week) and medium-term. Communication with your folks is important even if you're still figuring out the details.

Phyllochrysa may have also been mimicking Selaginella, which was later identified from the Myanmar amber by Schmidt et al, 2022. This is a diagram I made for a blog in 2019, so it needs updating. Also, just a note: Myanmar amber is ethically horrible, and studies on it should no longer be supported.

Diagram with pictures of a frilly league like insect, and some plant remains in amber, and a photo of a living selaginella. In the top left there is a drawing of a frilly, leaf like insect larvae, and on the left there is an insect with long jaws carrying a mound of debris on its back.
Liam Elward Paleoart 🇵🇸@paleobyliam.bsky.social · 2y ago

Phyllochrysa huangi • Liverwort Mimesis in a Cretaceous Lacewing Larva (Liu et al. 2018) Illustration by Dinghua Yang #paleoart #paleoentomology #sciart

Illustration showing the extinct lacewing larva Phyllochrysa huangi blending in amongst liverworts