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!

Pretty silver on this Silver-studded blue, from Edmund Sandars, ‘A Butterfly book for the pocket’ (1939).

A weird tale for New Year's Eve. "Ancient Lights" by Algernon Blackwood. 31 Dec, streamed live at 8pm, and available to catch up any time. Free to view. Just click here: youtube.com/live/BsrjjVd...

The collections at Ely Stained Glass Museum are brilliant. Here's part of a jokey 1930 take on The Prodigal Son, made by Moira Forsyth while she was attending the @royalcollegeofart.bsky.social.

Algernon Blackwood connoisseurs: should I read this?

Paul Delvaux's painting The Awakening of the Forest (1939) was inspired by the subterranean forest in Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth. As far as I know (not much), we don't have a wide-ranging study of Surrealism's relationship with Earth's history (www.artic.edu/artworks/111...)

Paul Delvaux (Belgian, 1897–1994). Loneliness (1956, oil).

This book contains a hell of a lot of murderous Norman peasants. And typos.

Local enthusiasts in Bearsden, East Dunbartonshire, Scotland want to install a sculpture of the fossilised shark found there in 1982 where experts could see the last meal eaten by the fish 330 million years ago. 👇 The prehistoric shark found in a town in Scotland www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Qui c'est qui veut la bonne sousoupe cancérigène ?

Took a bit of time the other day to visit the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton). Two different exhibitions include work by Lawren Harris, who is possibly my favourite Canadian artist. This one is typical of mid-career Harris. 'Mountain Sketch', 1924. 1/9

For #FossilFriday here is some #UrbanGeology. Visiting York Minster but my eyes were drawn to C18 memorials with very dark limestone and lovely #fossil #corals.

Spot the clergyman-geologist goblin chipping away at the rock. A festive detail from Arthur Rackham's 'Common Objects at the Seaside ', painted for Punch's 1905 Almanack.

Augusta and Burian's Prehistoric Animals is an especially beautiful book of 'scenes from deep time', but the effort doesn't just go into the charismatic dinosaurs and mega-mammals. Exhibit A: The Stegocephalians.

Futurama response mechanism activated

I’m bursting with pride to say I passed my viva @lboroenglish.bsky.social last week! Thank you to my examiners @andrewkingc19.bsky.social & @drclaireocall.bsky.social for such a positive experience and my supervisors @profsarahparker.bsky.social & @braddonite.bsky.social for a truly memorable day!

Loving the new flyer for next year's (50th anniversary) Magic Lantern Society convention

And with that the last formation piece of the year is done! Monte Bolca is one of the most famous productive fossil lagerstätten in the world! This Italian paradise for Eocene fossils is just as ingrained into paleontology like Solnhofen or Hell Creek. But since we...

I'm back in @historytoday.com for January's 75th anniversary issue. This time: 'Walking with Titans'.

A forgotten Tennessee Williams horror play, written for radio as part of his University of Iowa coursework and performed on air perhaps only once, has been published in the Strand Magazine. www.theguardian.com/culture/2025...

'Property', a compact little ecocritical Siegfried Sassoon poem. 'We nothings use a name / Nor ask whence acorns came / Before the oak was planted'.

Is there a reason some Proquest Ebooks are still proper scans of the book, and others are reformatted rich text versions that give inaccurate pagination?

After a series of delays, my article "Harry Price and the Crawley Poltergeist" has finally been published in the Magazine of the Society for Psychical Research. A big thanks to @emmamerkling.bsky.social, who originally directed me to the case and digitised the requisite archival material.

The most complete skeleton of a woolly mammoth unearthed in Michigan is to be found in the Museum of Natural History, Andrews University. The museum's located in Price Hall, named for young-Earth creationist George McCready Price (who's discussed at length in my book doncha know) #FossilFriday

Help! Banbury Museum has been told that Cherwell District Council is cancelling ALL of its core funding. There is a very tight deadline - Friday 19th December - to tell the Council what you think. Please respond to the consultation and share this post www.banburymuseum.org/news/no-fund...

The History Today issue sidebar makes for a good source of found poetry, or perhaps news headlines. 'Mongols, Elizabethan Theatre, State Recognition'. 'Thucydides, Birmingham, Occupied Japan'.

The 75th Anniversary issue of History Today is in stores from today. Featuring: #ColdWar Yugoslavia, Oswald of Northumbria, the wreck of the San José, British Raj, #AuroraBorealis, and more. Find out what else is inside and where to get it at www.historytoday.com/magazine

I quite like that illustrations of graptolites often look like they're done by someone slowly going mad, like the protagonist of an Edgar Allan Poe story.

😍We are rejoining Erasmus. Official announcement tomorrow😍 www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

So that's what the M&S meal deal costs now, huh

Heading to @nhmlibraryarchives.bsky.social today on the trail of this woman: Gertrude Elles, graptolite palaeontologist extraordinare. Left: the young Victorian hammer-wielder, from a photo in the @sedgwickmuseum.bsky.social. Right: her sagely postwar portrait at Newnham College, Cambridge.

Left: a magnificent mammoth tooth at Ely Museum. Right: a ghost exhibit of Bronze Age artefacts stolen from the museum last year.

Skies over Ely.

Hi both. These are both titled "Antediluvian Animals, Crystal Palace", by the London Stereoscopic Co, "early 1860s" (and both need a post or two writing about them..!) Negretti & Zamba were v active at the Palace, loads of stereographs, but they were seperate to the above company(?)

Ongoing decimation of British universities part 252: Apx. 1000 academic staff at University of Essex just received formal ‘risk of redundancy’ letters via email. Please share @ucuessex.bsky.social @ucu.org.uk

I could get Haeckel's illustration of Annelid Marine Worms with my Tesco order for some reason.

Lord Tennyson famously called astronomy and geology 'terrible Muses'. Amused to see here the Scottish literary educationalist Arthur Melville Clark, writing in 1922, suggest that it was time to include 'Psychology and Engineering among the terrible Muses'.

Now that the scaffolding is gone, you can get a good look at a rare artform — heraldic palaeontology — above the Downing Street door of the @sedgwickmuseum.bsky.social

Hadn't seen this, although it was hiding in plain sight in a 2016 Linda Hall article (www.lindahall.org/about/news/s...): the translation of Franz Unger's Ideal Views of the Primitive World depicts a photographed diorama of @cpdinosaurs.bsky.social models, with an advert for B. W. Hawkins's wares.

Nick Gaskill and I are organising a panel on Whitehead, focused on Science & the Modern World, for the MSA/BAMS conference in 2026, and are looking for an additional contributor. Email me by 25 November on [email protected] if you’re interested! #WeirdModernisms #BAMS2026 #MSA2026

@doingsofdoyle.com I've just been listening to your excellent episode on 'The Adventure of the Devil's Foot'. Did you ever come across that intriguing special spin-off edition of the Strand, containing alleged photographs of the scene of the crime?