The early twentieth century is about the last time a professional illustrator might not have a dinosaur reference at hand and instead relied on the author's similes. Thus this Megalosaurus/Allosaurus in the Je Sais Tout serial of The Lost World. Conan Doyle says the dinosaur resembled a toad.

Ely Cathedral entering its Impressionist phase.

King Kong 1933 turns public domain in three years. I hope somebody's planning something that includes this greatly troubled T. rex.

Turns out there's a subplot in Right Ho, Jeeves that's effectively about the relationship between literature and science (or rather poetry and newts). Also, judging by the size of his section in Topping & Company, Wodehouse is still far more popular than I had realised.

As it's Burns Night, here's CM Hardie's 1893 painting, The Meeting of Robert Burns and Walter Scott which took place in Edinburgh in the winter of 1786-87. But who's the seated man on the right, pressing his fingertips together? It's geologist James Hutton who'll be 300 years old in June this year.

"Alternate Histories of the Body" is next week! I'm highlighting our workshop, "Experiencing Academia Through the Body" by Francesca Young Kaufman (11:15 AM GMT). Join us if you're interested in neuroscience-based tools for managing academic stress. The workshop is free and online. #AcademicSky 1/4

A depiction of academia's fate that makes for interesting reading in the current climate. I don't know how much periodical studies scholars have done with the description of the period before the novel's quasi-utopian action takes place: the degenerate 'Age of the Feuilleton'.

Greater Anglia! Four coaches are not enough! Whyyy

If you are considering applying for the Trust's Early Career Fellowship scheme, listen to some of our former and current Fellows from universities across the UK talk about their areas of research and their experiences. media.leverhulme.ac.uk/video/leverh... Deadline: 19 February 2026, 4pm

Any excuse for me to report Gramsci's view that Chesterton's detective fiction was the work of 'a great artist'. In his Letters from Prison, Gramsci argues that Father Brown 'totally defeats Sherlock Holmes, makes him look like a pretentious little boy, shows up his narrowness and pettiness'.

A serving of Megatherium skull from Punta Alta, Patagonia, presented to the @hunterianmuseum.bsky.social by Charles Darwin #FossilFriday

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below! Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

*pokes head through the Bluesky door* *waves* hi, hello, we're almost at the end of January 2026 and I want to be more active in this Bluesky world. If you're looking for community on here and/or thoughts on writing/teaching/contemporary adulthood/horror media/digital culture, follow along 🫡

You don't hear much about him, presumably due to his uncharismatic subject matter (fossil gastropods, graptolites, etc.), but Georg Liljevall was a reliably exceptional artist. '[S]cientific draughtsman to the Riksmuseum, Stockholm, from 1873 till 1919', as his Museums Journal obituary states.

Sauropod #dinosaurs were the largest land animals ever to have lived – but how did they live? ⌛️ Last chance to read the latest Great Debates for free www.historytoday.com/archive/grea...

The book "Palaeontology in Public" is one year old today! 🦣🦖🦕🎂🎉 We've apparently had 7,756 downloads (!!), so many thanks to @uclpress.bsky.social for publishing it and making it open access, and to all the contributors, and to everyone who has read it so far

News | Giant mechanical scorpion free to good home, says Natural History Museum 🔗https://museumsandheritage.com/advisor/posts/natural-history-museum-offers-giant-mechanical-scorpion-free-to-good-home/

Patrick Morgan on Contesting Earth's History in the Review of English Studies: 'beautifully detailed, intricately researched, and compelling'. What more could you wish for? The review, for those with access: academic.oup.com/res/advance-...

RIP German anthropologist Johannes Fabian, who passed away last Tuesday. Fabian was most widely known as the author of "Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object" (1983), a then-radical & still-influential critique of anthropological writing, knowledge-making & fieldwork relations. RIP.

The Creation of Trees and Herbs https://www.wikiart.org/en/paul-nash/the-creation-of-trees-and-herbs-1924

Contesting Earth's History out in the wild!

A #FossilFriday request for history of palaeontology in Poland identification help! I'm trying to figure out who the palaeontologist in the below photo is. It was taken in Warsaw in the late-1960s, and the arms are (of course) the Deinocheirus arms found during the Polish-Mongolian expeditions

Resident Evil 3 ~ バイオハザード3 (1999) Developed by Capcom.

#FossilFriday Graptolites are extremely useful as zonal fossils in the Ordovician and Silurian. Some look like pencil marks but better preserved examples, like this Monograptus priodon from the Wenlock of Scotland, resemble miniature saw blades.

Dental phantoms on display in the @hunterianmuseum.bsky.social. Let's just hope they stay there.

Surely those aren’t back issues of the eminent Victorian Studies being used as decoration in a hotel in Amsterdam?

I like the idea of UCL students in the 1970s trying solemnly to examine the chunky Polacanthus toy and dweeb Spinosaurus. From the historic collections of the @uclgrantmuseum.bsky.social.

Yesterday I helped to hoover this venerable chunk of material culture (a near-200-year-old cast of Deinotherium's skull at the @sedgwickmuseum.bsky.social). Careful not to suck up any ephemeral paratexts!

Would not mess with this chappy from Sheppey @sedgwickmuseum.bsky.social

It's always been bizarre to me that they routinely adapt those bright, bouncy, rhyming Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler children's books into slow, melancholy reflections on mortality for Christmas TV.

Three short paragraphs, and you've got the whole mind-bending mess that is #UKHE finance & governance neatly laid out. This is why it's all so exhausting: our managers declare there's only one static frame, while we know their framing is part of the issue. 💡 www.hepi.ac.uk/2026/01/10/w...

#FossilFriday Holotype of the phocid pinniped Pliophoca etrusca, exhibited at the Natural History Museum (University of Pisa). It comes from the Pliocene of Tuscany, and was likely related to Mediterranean monk seals. It was described by Tavani (1941) and reevaluated by Berta et al. (2015).

Call now open for Visiting Fellowships in our Natural History Humanities programme! Building long-term collaborations with early career researchers on Cambridge GLAM collections. @camunivmuseums.bsky.social @theul.bsky.social @cubotanicgarden.bsky.social www.ccc.cam.ac.uk/initiatives/...

Last year I published a chapter with @richardfallon.bsky.social comparing Conan Doyle's Lost World with Crichton's Jurassic Park and the parallels between the two. Yesterday we were awarded 'Doylean Honors' from the Arthur Conan Doyle Society for our scholarship. acdsociety.com/Honors/Honor...

Many thanks to the @acdsociety.bsky.social for recognising @davehone.bsky.social and my chapter on Arthur Conan Doyle and Michael Crichton in "Palaeontology in Public"! For the Open Access volume, ed. by @chrismanias.bsky.social: uclpress.co.uk/book/palaeon...

An exciting conclusion to my time as Research Fellow on the @mediaandepidemics.bsky.social project! Dr Melissa Dickson & I are co-writing a book ‘A British Literary Contagion: ‘Russian Flu’ and Popular Culture at the Fin de Siècle’ for the @manchesterup.bsky.social @sshmedicine.bsky.social series🦠

Amazing. The only previous combination of dinosaurs and early modern verse drama that I know of is T. D. A. Cockerell's Progress: A Drama of Evolution (1916), which I reprinted in my @valancourtbooks.bsky.social anthology Creatures of Another Age.

Possibly the least eventful cover The Lost World has ever been graced with?

Graptolite? Not graptolite. @sedgwickmuseum.bsky.social

Pretty sure the reduction in carriages on my train back is going to lead to a murder soon

Hurray! Congratulations. @biodivlibrary.bsky.social is essential and will hopefully be saved. #HistNatHist #NatHist

Astonished to learn that my book Contesting Earth's History is suddenly, perhaps for a brief window, almost affordable. Why? Who knows.

Surprised Philip Larkin agreed to model for this advert.

The thermostat's reading Pleistocene at the @sedgwickmuseum.bsky.social.

𝐇𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫 from all of us at Systematics and Biodiversity ✨ Wishing you all a great 2026✨ Throwback to our most read paper of 2025 by Scott 𝘦𝘵 𝘢𝘭.: Collecting and cataloguing the world: the botanical collections of Hans Sloane (1660–1753) 🌿 Read here: buff.ly/ce37BTZ #Taxonomy #Collections

Snowy Ely.

That Siegfried Sassoon sure could write 'em (when he wanted to).

Happy New Year! Excited to announce that as of January 1, @sarahmpicks.bsky.social and I are the new co-editors-in-chief of the Endeavour history and philosophy of science journal. If ever you had an idea for an article in that realm, now is the time to pitch it to us!

Here's a weird but charismatic bird. It was produced by James Powell and Sons, Whitefriars, c. 1850 (Stained Glass Museum, Ely). Happy New Year, everyone!