ichnologist.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

This #FossilFriday- #Juneteenth I'm celebrating the life and work of Louis R. Purnell. Started out as a Tuskegee Airman. Taught himself geology and paleontology, found a passion for nautiloids and cephalopods. He wrote a catalog of invertebrates while working with the NMNH that is still the go-to.

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Photoshopping @lastweektonight.com's John Oliver onto fossils until the Paleontological Research Institution secures their funding! Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) and John (Homo sapiens) say TRANS RIGHTS NOW

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Danielle N Lee is a biologist whose research focuses on the connections between ecology, evolution and animal behaviour. She studies the African giant pouched rat's behavioural syndromes and the potential role of genetics in these behaviours. Read more: adalovelaceday.subst...

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I wonder if a movement to go analog is going to be the next trend. Analog as a form of rebellion. I like the idea.

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Important Juneteenth thread, highlighting the stories of Black scientists in academia. #Academicsky 🧪

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New day, new paper! 🦣🌍 Led by @mapaslab.bsky.social ab.bsky.social PhD student Sofía Galván and out now in Global Ecology and Biogeography in which we asked: "Could future palaeontologists detect today’s biodiversity patterns from fossils alone?" 🔗 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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Another new horseshoe crab, this time the first known Silurian species, filling a 63 million year gap in the horseshoe crab fossil record. This specimen was actually found by Sam Ciurca 50 years ago - another example of the importance of museum collections! ⚒️🧪 doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

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NEW PAPER, NEW THREAD! 👀 We collected insects in creeks polluted with raw sewage. 🤢 Microplastics in caddisflies were once rare. But now, in some creeks, more than half of all cases include artificial material! 🤯 A shitty thread on plastics and poop, thankfully, without the smell of it 💩 1/x 🧵👇

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Watched Episode 3 of the new BBC 'Walking with Dinosaurs' series last night on @pbs.org. Pleased overall with its blend of recreations that are tied to a specific place & time, while also including paleontologists excavating dinosaur bones in the field. 🧪🦖🦕⚒️🪨 1/2 www.pbs.org/show/walking...

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Meanwhile, at White Sands National Park ... www.livescience.com/archaeology/...

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These tiny creature are called the "carriers of stone seeds" in Ancient Greek. Known as coccolithophores, these algae shield their bodies in stunning calcium plates. In ancient times they were so numerous their bodies—piled in the trillions—formed the rock of the White Cliffs of Dover, in England

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Geology Word of the Day! Catastrophism - (a) The doctrine that sudden violent, short-lived, more or less worldwide events events outside our present experience or knowledge of nature have greatly modified the Earth’s crust; ⚒️🌎🪨🌋📚❄️⛏️🌊🏔️🦕🔥⏳ #GWOTD

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Leafminers are very, very cool. And this beetles knows it, and puts on a show.

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About 70,000 years ago, a new study suggests, our species learned to live just about anywhere. Later, that ability helped our ancestors expand from Africa across the world. Here’s my story on the human niche [Gift link] nyti.ms/3ZBc7ID

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Finding fossils depends as much on light and time of day as search image. I’ve walked over this Jurassic sandstone sidewalk slab multiple times over 14 years but only today saw the spider tracks, those clusters of three dots. 🧪

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www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences...

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For the first time ever, researchers have found the fossilized gut contents of a sauropod. It’s revealing exactly what they ate… and how little they chewed. 🦕 Plus, find out who’s eavesdropping on prairie dog towns.

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Newly Identified Monstersaur Lizard Had an Armored Skull and Walked Among Dinosaurs www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences...

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If you are enjoying #WalkingWithDinosaurs tonight on @pbs.org know that the public lands that many of these critters’ fossils come from in the US are under threat to be sold by our government. Call your Senators! #DinosaurPBS

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The longest lived animal is not a whale, not a shark nor a tortoise but a clam (507 years old).

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Reskeeting this for the p.m. folks in the Americas: oldest fossil termite nest in Australia (Early Cretaceous, 127 mya!) & the only nest in a formerly polar region, when Australia was still connected to Antarctica. New research by Jon Edwards, me, & a bunch of Australian coauthors. 🧪🪵💩🪳 #ichnology

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Stegosaurus was already a fossil by the time that T. rex lived

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'Evidence of massive dinosaur mating ritual uncovered in Colorado' | Science | www.science.org/content/arti...

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One is the brains, the other is the muscle.

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It’s so easy to be an artist. You just do it. That, of course, is why it’s so hard to be an artist. You just have to do it. People despise how artistic courage highlights their own cowardice. Thus, crave the art, despise the artist. my random thoughts on it, better said by all the ppl in history

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youtu.be/ATxQnJc_VIs?...

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This, 100% this. A key part of life is being able to look at an unfamiliar problem and figure out how to solve it. Maybe through tinkering or knowing how to find someone with genuine expertise to help, but the ability to say "okay, what do I need to do to figure this out" is valuable in itself!

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Ancient termite poo reveals 120 million-year-old secrets of Australia’s polar forests theconversation.com/ancient-term...

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www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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I just pulled out my copy of Newton's Principia, a book that was originally written in Latin, and noticed that the translation I am using was completed with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has basically been destroyed Science depends on the humanities 🧪

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Every time I teach my Environmental Communication class & we cover fallacy arguments, I think of this pro-con "debate" in @theonion.com published just before the start of the Iraq War in 2003.

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Tonight is the night! Tune in to watch our crew excavate the world’s largest concentration of armored dinosaurs and see both Gastonia and Utahraptor come to life on @pbs.org #WalkingWithDinosaurs #WWD2025

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What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? Most species that have ever lived are extinct AND most we will never even have a fossil record of.

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“What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?” Authors don’t make a living from their books. Not from their advances and not from their royalties. Not remotely.

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The “red planet” Mars isn't purely red, but more of a rusty brown or tan color due to iron oxide in its rocks and dust. The planet's appearance changes when viewed through different types of telescopes and light spectrums. An astrophysicist explains: buff.ly/dvN4mfe

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Photoshopping @lastweektonight.com’s John Oliver onto fossils until the Paleontological Research Institution secures their funding! Fossil is an ‘X-fish’, Xiphactinus audax, from the Cretaceous of the Western Interior Seaway. Comedian is H. sapiens. Fish is an Atlantic salmon. Not to scale.

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Today is #WorldCrocodileDay and to celebrate here is Plesiosuchus mansellii, a super interesting marine crocodilian relative that lived during the Late Jurassic in Europe Plesiosuchus was a thalattosuchian, a group of crocodylomorph that evolved extreme aquatic adaptations #paleoart #art

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New article in @theconversation.com reporting on: oldest fossil termite nest (~127 mya) in Australia; one of the largest fossil termite nests in wood; only known termite nest from a formerly polar region; & with evidence of wood-eating mites. theconversation.com/ancient-term... #insects #ichnology

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Are you a palaeo person that struggles to keep on top of new discoveries? Or simply fossil-curious and want to learn about the world of the past? Introducing the FOSSIL FILES! A new podcast where two palaeontologists explain and dissect exciting new finds. Episode 1: How does your plesiosaur swim?

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Some paleoart going for a dark and moody vibe. #paleoart #darkdinos

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