Continuing #Crustmas and #InverteFest to the bitter end, here's an old shot of a blue crab swimming over an oyster reef in a mockup of Chesapeake Bay at the Virginia Aquarium. 🦀🦪

Wishing you peace and comfort for #InverteFest and the liminal days, here at the end of all things. 🪼

In the darkness of midwinter, something moves in the water. It's giant isopod #Crustmas

But wait! There's more! It's also #InverteFest and I didn't tag the bugs in amber. Or the barnacle. So here's some Ohio invertebrates tucked away in a corner of the COSI Oceans exhibit.

For #FossilFriday, we have another display from COSI's joint dinosaur exhibit with AMNH. ⚒️🧪 This one has family allusions. Not only am I stuck in a sappy relationship (although I am not half as well preserved), but my father would plant groves of Metasequoia wherever he moved.

Still #Crustmas! I think I have enough to make it through the year, but I am definitely raiding some very old aquarium photos to get there. Giant barnacle, feeding. Oregon Aquarium (the other Newport).

UNESP-Botucatu paleo peeps represent! I spent weeks there years ago, helping to describe modern brachiopod assemblages of the South Atlantic. Marcello Simões was a gracious host and fantastic collaborator, and I owe a great deal to him and the crew at Botacatu. ⚒️🧪

Merry #Crustmas! A hermit crab tries not to watch as a horseshoe crab unwraps a present. 🦀🐚

Merry Xmas, ya filthy animals! I guess we're celebrating the start of #InverteFest with a variation of Helicoplacus in a Santa hat. ⚒️🧪 No generative AI here, just bad art mutilating a beautiful specimen of one of the oldest, weirdest echinoderms ever.

The prawn is here for #Crustmas The horseshoe crab is hiding its lack of antennae in shame. Don't feel bad! Chelicerae are awesome too!

InverteFest is coming ... Or as some of us like to call it, days that end in 'y'.

@costanca.bsky.social, @kate-mitchell.bsky.social , does this 🧵 remind you guys of anything? Me, I think of the time we faced the ice worm and the gnome's player was late again. And I had the magic button box labeled "do not touch."

T'is Christmas Eve morn, and sunrise greets me with a very chonky squirrel on the trunk of my biggest pine, barking at the glass door.

Aa a faithless and unreliable servant of the Black Cat 🐈‍⬛ and her minions, I offer my loyal fealty with all the sincerity with which they have become accustomed.

Visiting COSI, but I can't escape the fossils of New Concord. ⚒️🧪🦈 Late Paleozoic glacioeustasy drove sea level fluctuations of 100m, which meant episodic inundation of local coal swamps every 100,000 years or so. The Ames records one of the last marine transgressions in the region.

Digging deep for #Crustmas, I finally find my own hermit crab! 🦀🐚

#MolluskMonday 🐚🧪 sometimes means hanging out and catching some rays. No, wait. I mean "rays" here like UV in a blacklight tank designed to show off reef fluorescence. I don't think this snail could snag a whole ray. OTOH, @laurasita.bsky.social has a story about an apple snail and fish ...

Running low on options for #Crustmas... of course, that's like saying one's running low on dinosaur art while sitting on notebooks full of bird sketches. But here are some more barnacles. I enjoy the single pebble encrusted all over.

#Crustmas isn't complete without some home decor! 🦀🐚

🔭 Sunset Solstice over Stonehenge Image Credit & Copyright: English Heritage, Josh Dury apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25122...

Crawdad celebrating the end of fall and beginning of winter. 🦞 #Crustmas continues ...

Happy Solstice! Brighter days ahead. Ya know, if yule like that sort of thing.

Whatcha looking at, bub? How many color receptors do yout eyes have, eh? Three? Bah! No wonder you think everything's monochromatic! Peacock mantis shrimp 🦞 #Crustmas

They took away my job, my courses, my department. They took apart my community and collections built up over decades. They can't take away what I taught a generation, and still teach. I'm still here sharing those fossils and field trips. They can't take away the difference or we make.

New paper alert! 🚨 🐌 We studied historic Antarctic fossils from the Zinsmeister Collection to assess whether the K-Pg extinction, as recorded on Seymour Island, was sudden or gradual. We found that benthic life thrived in the 4 million years before the K-Pg. doi.org/10.1016/j.pa...

With dinosaur tracks in my news feed again, they seem an appropriate choice for #FossilFriday. ⚒️🧪🦕👣 This is the incomparable @wickedtruth81.bsky.social slapping paws with a Cretaceous thyreophoran footprint in the Dakota sandstone along Skyline Drive, Cañon City, Colorado. 🧵

Happy #Crustmas! Don't be crabby, it's Friday before the holiday! Well, ok, be crabby then. See if I care. 🦀

In the game of life, some are born queens ... but most are just prawns. En passant! #Crustmas

So, bowhead whales, which can live over 200 years, may not be so special after all. "Extreme longevity may be the rule not the exception in Balaenid whales", big if true 🧪 🐋 #PetosParadox www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

For my giant Triassic ichthyosaur homies ... you know who you are. (It should be all of you!)

When sunrise hits the mirror ball, and the cat doesn't know which spot of light to chase. 🐈‍⬛

Hoo boy, lemme tell you about academia these days ...

Ok, butterflies, it's #Crustmas again. Again. Again? Again. Look, maybe if we just stuffed some 🦀 inside some barnacles, and then slapped more barnacles on top?

Still $400,000 short of its goal to save the Museum of the Earth. Pocket change for a billionaire, but nobody's coming to save it but us. Still a couple weeks to get another 10,000 people to donate $40 though.

It's like on the eve of WWII we decided to stop funding R&D into weapons systems to develop advanced aircraft, ships, and tanks. Climate change is going to kick our butts if we lose NCAR (and NOAA) at a time when climate change is increasing extreme weather events capable of crashing the economy.

It is also evidently #ctenophoreTuesday (shouldn't that be ctuesday?) and I love me some comb jellies, even if I could rarely get good pics of 'em. This is from Monterey.

Merry #Crustmas! 🦀 I've been down the rabbithole of old aquarium photos. Expect the next few days to represent the other Newport Aquarium ... not the one in Kentucky, the Oregon Aquarium in Newport, Oregon. Prawns, anyone?

#MolluskMonday ... Here we have densely packed phragmocones of late Ordovician orthocone nautiloids, a highlight of the Cincinnatian limestones. 🧪⚒️ One of my favorite field trip outcrops was a slab of nautiloid shells oriented parallel to wave ripples in the spillway at Caesar Creek.

I realize that I don't have nearly enough photos of local arthropods, but there's still a few in the old teaching collection for #Crustmas. Here's Idotea robusta, an isopod. Not to be confused with Coffea canephora var. robusta, which has a much higher caffeine content.

Everything gets named in alt-text down thread (this, btw, uses alt-text exceptionally well), including the logic behind it. No, it is not a linear phylogeny. Each fossil stands in as a representation of a contemporary member of the clade wherein a specific adaptation appears. Yay, Astraspis!

I am not entirely sure what distinguishes a crawdad from a crayfish, but this specimen clearly doesn't rise to the level of land lobster. 🦞 #Crustmas

The original definition of academic freedom came from the American Association of University Professors--the union for professors--in response to suppression against professors for being "too left" & it focused a LOT on universities not being beholden to corporate funders or wealthy benefactors...🧵

Lovely intertidal, northern Tasmanian serpulid worms encrusting a boulder (~60 cm wide). Each marine worm secretes its own tube out of calcium carbonate - tubes 2-3 mm diam. These critters can build extensive communities on rocky shores. ⚒️🧪🌊

#Crustmas rides again, this ti.e with a fiddler crab in bioplastic. 🎻🦀

Many of us grew up in a world on the perpetual brink of an inevitable global thermonuclear war we were powerless to stop. Yet our parents, who also grew up under that shadow, built families and raised us and saved for a better future that was always 15 minutes from destruction. Don't give up.

The #BEASTLab won second place in the departmental holiday decoration contest!

#FossilFriday... but despite the resemblance, these are not crustaceans (sorry, no Crustmas here). These are molts from Eurypterus, a Silurian chelicerate often described as a sea scorpion. 🦂⚒️🧪

🧵 It's hard to believe but 10 years ago today the Paris Agreement was signed at COP21🌎 Where are we at in 2025? Projected warming this century has dropped from ~4°C in 2015 to 2.6°C today, if current emissions reduction pledges are implemented. But a lot more work is needed!

Well, gang, I don't know how many more pictures I have here for #Crustmas, but here's another 🦀 from Newport Aquarium.

Slab of fossil sea urchins, 17 in. wide, Lower Cretaceous, Cooke Cty., Texas. All are Holasters except for those broken which are Halfasters. 🤪 #Urchins #Cretaceous #paleontology #Holaster