Going old school for #FossilFriday ⚒️🧪🧽 with some archaeocyathids. Enigmatic fossils from the middle Cambrian, these were the first metazoan reef builders! So, what were they? Good question. While the extinctions of the late Cambrian left no survivors, they show strong similarities to sponges!

@autsquidsquad.bsky.social had also re-done these estimates in 2022 and their results are even more crazy 😳

Real life monster battle. Wow.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪 Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students. I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

major traffic incident

I don't have much for #MolluskMonday 🧪🦪. Shellfish of me, I know. But this bioeroded fragment of a mussel is happy to meet you.

The Fall/Autumnal Equinox is TODAY at 2:19 PM EDT. That's the time at which our Sun is directly over the Earth's equator, signaling the start of Northern Hemisphere astronomical fall. The Earth’s northern hemisphere will continue to tilt further from the sun through the Winter Solstice on Dec 21.

Happy equinox! The world has been descending into darkness for a while now, but there is a cycle to these things. Balance is dynamic, and we will return to the light once again.

Yo, dawg! I heard you like #FossilFriday! Here we got brachiopods on your brachiopod, so you can fliter feed while you host a small community of filter feeders! 🧪⚒️ Look, brachiopod encrustation might not be the sexiest area of paleoecology, but it is surprisingly data rich. And that's sexy science.

If u see this quote with the energy you bring to Bluesky

Out today in @commsearth.nature.com from some of my newest colleagues at UMMP: evidence that the extinction of dinosaurs led to fundamental shifts in terrestrial environments, and that this signal is recorded in facies shifts tied to the K-Pg boundary: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

#MolluskMonday was here! 🧪🐌 While it has long been fashionable to imagine the Loch Ness Monster as a swan-necked plesiosaur, this semi-infaunal gastropod suggests an alternative hypothesis ...

Well, check out this big chonk! The giant ichthyosaurs of the late Triassic don't get near enough love or respect, but they swam in pods in the waters of Nevada up until the mass extinction. Some of us have vivid memories of hauling vertebrae out of New York Canyon summer of '91 ...

Sigh ... I'm not saying anything here that hasn't been said before, better, by better folk. But we've got one job here, people. Take care of each other. That's it. You don't have to like one another, or necessarily be kind. But if your words and choices don't serve that end, maybe reconsider.

Lessee here ... something something #FossilFriday ... ⚒️🧪🦕🦖 Galeamopus says hello! A close cousin of Diplodocus, this one is first to greet visitors to the Cincinnati Museum Center, with a juvenile standing beside it. Somewhere in the distance, a loooong way behind the tail, lurks Torvosaurus.

My roommate and a bunch of my friends from freshman year in college went to Evergreen HS. So, yeah, news hits kinda hard. Course, not as bad as the kid who brought a shotgun to the high school where I went to preschool and learned to swim. I think about Eisenhower's iron cross metaphor a lot.

Germany’s famous study showed over 80% insect declines in farmland over 27 years. “Those findings were often blamed on pesticides and habitat loss. Sockman’s work shows something different. Insects are collapsing even in a meadow with little human pressure. Climate itself may be enough.”

In under the wire for #MolluskMonday with some unionid bivalves, better known as freshwater mussels. Appalachia is a biodiversity hotspot for unionids, although many are threatened, endangered, or already extinct. They were harvested extensively for buttons and extremely sensitive to pollution. 🧪🦪

Doctors I trust more than RFK Jr. The status is not quo.

🔭 All the Water on Planet Earth Illustration Credit: Jack Cook, Adam Nieman, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Data source: Igor Shiklomanov apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25090...

Avast, me hearties! It be #FossilFriday! ⚒️🧪 Going a little obscure this week with a hyolith. Part of the Cambrian Fauna, its evolutionary relationships and ecology remain somewhat mysterious. Seems most likely they were benthic, sedentary filter feeders, and they are found in priapulid guts.

Ichthyosaurs in hot water: the large ichthyosaur Cymbospondylus had adapted to an open water, pelagic niche by the Spathian, < 5mya after the end-Permian. SSTs were still stupid high. Marine biomass and abundance were recovering well before diversity did, but ichthyosaurs got an early start.

Would you believe that we don't have an evolutionary tree for the biggest group of fossil jawless fish? UNTIL NOW THAT IS! Our new paper "A Phylogeny for Heterostraci" 10+ years in development, 100+ taxa, is finally out (thread)

#MolluskMonday ? Ah, balogna.⚒️🧪🐌 The nacreous inner layer of this large abalone demonstrates the iridescence that made it such an inviting target for human use. That, and the large, muscular foot.

Excited to announce that the 1st paper from my postdoc is now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social ! Using a large dataset of 3D preserved fossils, we explore the diversification of jaws in early bony fishes. 1/15 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Are you ready, kids? Aye aye, Captain! I can't hear you! AYE AYE, CAPTAIN! Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? #InverteFest 🧪⚒️🧽 Look, if you require scientific accuracy from your marine biology themed children's cartoons, maybe Octonauts > Spongebob Squarepants. Still, cultural cachet ...

Today's #InverteFest offering is for @jopabinia.bsky.social ... okay, sure, it's just a Dungeness crab, but check out the chelae!

I can see how some people would struggle to find enough pictures on their phone to feed #InverteFest day after day after day ... I am not those people. ⚒️🧪🦪 Invertebrate macrofauna get a fair amount of attention (as they should!), but their epifauna sadly tends to get written off or ignored.

Chief Wiggums: Well, Lou, this looks like the work of #FossilFriday!⚒️🧪🦕 Lou: No bones about it, Chief! The juvenile Apatosaurus mounted at Carnegie is one of my favorites, in large part because ... it isn't. Large, I mean. We all start out small! Even sauropods started out as a single cell!

Apparently ... and this is totally random trivia here ... there are still invertebrates living here with us today! In the modern world! #InverteFest 🦑 The more you know! This clubhook squid is from the Seaside Aquarium in Seaside Oregon. With bonus seal skulls!

You want to see this new geologic map of the contiguous US that the USGS just released.

This arrived at the local library. It's like they know me or something? @peterbrannen.bsky.social Not going to lie, it's a bit bigger than, say, When The Earth Was Green or A Brief History of Earth. More carbon sequestration per unit! Pity the local university closed their environmental programs

#InverteFest continues! Today, we have Chaetetes favosus. Whatever it was. Sponge? Tabulate coral? Enigmatic problematicum from the Pennsylvanian? Dunno. Whatever it was, its porous, colonial growth habit actually made it an acceptable reservoir rock for petroleum sometimes.

Earliest Triassic microbial mounds indicate an ‘oasis’ for recovery of life following the end-Permian extinction 🧪⚒️ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It's still #InverteFest, and since I didn't plan anything for the week and missed #TrilobiteTuesday, I should make up for my sin-vertebrate shortcomings. Isotelus maximus is Ohio's state fossil. This is just a cast I bought at Caesar Creek. Wither under its glare! Feel its judgment!

"Favorite" is doing some heavy lifting here (I don't do ranked lists), but my default answer is Maraapunisaurus fragillimus, the Bigfoot of Garden Park. Was it real? Who knows! Was it a rebbachisaur? I have doubts. Was it freaking GINORMOUS? Oh hell yes! upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

Is it still #Invertefest? 🦋

Waiting for some dental work on my upper incisors, I feel like I've picked up a heckler in the peanut gallery. 🐿

Going to sign off on #MolluskMonday and #Invertefest with an encrusted nautilus bearing serpulid worm tubes and a cheilostome bryozoan colony. Because charismatic cephalopods are awesome, but diversity is important. ⚒️🧪

Good morning 🦋! It's #MolluskMonday and #Invertefest so obviously it's time for dinosaurs, right? No? Seed ferns perhaps? Fine. Mollusks it is. 🐌 I hate to toot my own horn, but if I did, it would be something like this.

Look, world kinda sucks these days, not gonna lie. But. I'm a fucking amateur, but my interior painting game isn't terrible and I would've walked away pretty goddamn impressed with dinner tonight if someone else had cooked it.

When I worked in DC, I rode the Metro all the way in from Vienna (and rode a bus there and back again from the Fairfax Mall) when I wasn't carpooling* in. I appreciated the time to read and rock out on headphones instead of driving. Before that, I rode the Frankfurt subway across town daily.

Is it #FossilFriday again already? 🧪⚒️ Here's one of the best pentamerid brachiopods I've ever seen. Sure, it's moldic preservation, but it's also unusually complete for a pentamerid, and there are visible growth lines!

Not sure which is better, the art, or the alt text.

Friday morning book report for the science feeds 🧪⚒️ @kslivensky.bsky.social has geology puns and is not afraid to use them. I can say that this was greeted with deep enthusiasm by its target audience. (Heads up: don't throw books at kids. Don't throw rocks either!) 🧵

So, this showed up at my local library today ... I should probably review it, huh? @kslivensky.bsky.social

A #MolluskMonday metaphor for the 21st century, in five shells. 🧪⚒️🐌 The shells are vermetid gastropods, sedentary filter feeders characterized by loosening whorls that become progressively unwound, exploring regions of Raup's theoretical mollusk morphospace no snail explored before.

You think this is bad? Lemme tell you about the Griesbachian, 251 million years back ... Oh? In human terms? Yeah, this feels like that T. rex looking up at that bright light in the southern sky and thinking "uh-oh."

Good morning ⚒️🧪🪸 It's #FossilFriday! The upper Midwest is home to an unusual variety of colonial rugose corals called Hexagonaria, for reasons that seem self evident. Weathered specimens retain the characteristic hexagonal pattern and are also known as Petosky stones, after a site in Michigan.

Got me too! Only 9 articles, but use the gift link in the original thread to search your own material.