4% of annual finds recorded with the Portable Antiquities Scheme were DONATED to Museums.... thats right 4% 📢One last time folks 4%📢 C'mon people, without Generosity, Donation, Giving, Legacy or Sharing how do we & our future generations have access to our shared heritage?

Something I do wish non-historians would internalise is that (modern) historians are not (generally) just making shit up. We do in fact have sources and evidence and proof of things which have happened in the past

Fun fact: the ‘soaring blue glass screen’ (visible at left of image) is inspired by an 1820s stage set for The Magic Flute (specifically the Queen of the Night’s arrival scene)

I feel about 300 years old today.

Some cool marine critters from Puerto de la Cruz #Tenerife, Pachygraspus adsceoensis crab, Similiparma lurida, atlantic belnny (Ophioblennius atlanticus) and vieja (European parrotfish) Sparisoma cretense, some photos by Valentyna Inshyna 🦀🦑🐠🐙

Addendum: I quickly wrote something partially about the results, and the potential for misunderstanding, but also about history's profound irony. open.substack.com/pub/arutherf...

Got this with a couple of bath bombs. Smells like chocolate orange and the name is completely fantastic, as a fan of Sonic Youth

The 5th Marquess of Anglesey, who went bankrupt due to being just too damn fabulous 🥂

hung out with some beetle people, mentioned fairy shrimp, and they mentioned a specialist ground beetle which is a fairy shrimp predator. how can you know that much of the story and then not know the best part, which is that the beetles only hunt at night because the shrimp GLOW IN THE DARK

Entirely unsurprisingly, no aurorae are visible over my bit of south London because it’s bloody cloudy and also there’s too much light pollution. Think my only hope is to get one of those transcontinental flights that goes over the North Pole 😭

If anybody would like to, or knows anybody who might like to, do a small amount of paid research work for me at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, I would be very glad to hear from them.

I've written a post about a tiny monster, a copepod which is monstrous by name and by nature. It has no mouth and it must mate. As a juvenile, it lives in the body of a worm, and when it reaches adulthood, it pops out like a tiny xenomorph. #Invertebrate 🧪 dailyparasite.blogspot.com/2025/11/cymb...

We're excited for the release of Madfabulous, a film about Henry Cyril Paget the 5th Marquess of Anglesey. Henry Paget led an extravagant lifestyle, squandering his inheritance on a lavish social life & expensive jewellery before his premature death aged only 29. www.madasbirdsfilms.com/madfabulous

I don’t usually post about audio matters, and I’m not an expert…but here’s something wonderful. In the 1850s, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented a device to visually record sound, using lines traced on paper. He called it the phonautograph and the images phonautograms. 🧵

Shore-ly you didn't miss our most recent Linnean Lens talk? It's time to shell-ebrate as it's now available to watch on our YouTube channel-three guesses what it's about! Join Job Ablett as he uses his 22+ years of experience to show and tell about the amazing specimens in the Linnean's collection

Age yourself with gaming

Well, that’s me here all night now, trapped under a cat

Does Britain value culture any more? Ask the striking workers at the British Library (edited transcript of a speech given on the picket line outside the British Library on Friday 7th November) Zadie Smith’s script should be archived @britishlibrary.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

God bless Michael Shannon. '“I’m sure anybody who’s associated with promoting and selling this movie to the world is going to be horrified by everything I’ve said in this interview,” he agrees. “But I don’t really care.”'

Yet more proof that tardigrades rock. www.the-scientist.com/tardigrades-...

I really hate that song, but here is some beautiful archaeology art for the anniversary instead. I found this while working on the maritime archaeology issue of the journal, and it's going to be included.

Some excellent advice in this thread for anyone keen on really pissing off their fellow passengers.

I can’t get enough nitrogenous organic matter.

What’s everyone having? It has to be the whiting for me, with potatoes, then Madeira cake (no way would I attempt stewed prunes in a public place)

I'm pissed, but no amount of Democratic fuckery is going to keep me from #Fitzposting today. I've been saving memes for months. It's the 50th anniversary. I have 29 bottles of Great Lakes Brewing's Edmund Fitzgerald Porter lined up and ready to go (one for each man lost that day).

tell me you don't miss the language of the 19C

Ancient Trireme to Be Displayed in New Underwater Greek Archaeology Museum #museum #archaeology greekreporter.com/2025/11/10/a...

aaaaaaaaaaagh

More to the point, why are people taking and sharing photos of people doing something as ordinary and unobtrusive as reading?

Archibald Pitcairne died at the age of 60 #OTD in 1713. Pitcairne led the first recorded legal public dissection in Scotland when he dissected the remains of David Myles in 1702. The man leading the dissection in this painting is believed to be Pitcairne.

Sounds familiar

Fancy sink hole!

At the risk of having my citizenship revoked, I’m just not into the modern iteration of Paddington.

X-rays were discovered on this day November 8 in 1895, by physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, allowing us to see inside the human body. 🧶 This free knitting pattern for X-Ray Mittens or Gloves designed by Marjukka Vuorisalo is on my fun handwear post intheloopknitting.com/fun-mitten-a...

"The fedora, angled just so, is his homage to French Resistance hero Jean Moulin." 🥹

This is my paternal grandad, before he went off to war in 1914; he was 20 at the time and newly married. He was lucky enough to come back, but his health was never the same after being gassed. I never met him; he died in 1936.

I’d always wondered why no one had ever published a full, detailed map of the 1960s plan to turn London into a giant web of US-style urban motorways…. It turns even the politicians and designers didn’t make one at the time. It just didn’t exist. Until now.

“Where’s your fucking poppy?”

Bizarre phrenology-inspired piece on noses in the Illustrated London News, 28 May 1842. This bit is about the size <runs to mirror> (Like many a nose, it’s too long for the alt text, hence the two identical pics) 1/

Deep-sea mining starves life in the ocean’s twilight zone www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202... 🦑🌎🧪

I’d love to have this greet me every time I go to the door.

You know what this timeline needs tonight? A weird-ass invertebrate sea creature! Here's an undescribed (at time of photo, not sure about now) endemic Hawaiian Spiky sea cucumber, Stichopus sp. Actually an Earth life form. 📷🦑🐙 #invertebrates

10/10 take. No notes.

I don’t usually give in to blackmail 😂 but awww isopods

Today I learned that there is The Good Life fanfiction

I won as the Labour candidate at our school mock election in 1992 and was then paraded as proof of the coming Labour victory (which didn’t happen) at the actual Labour party’s pre-election meeting that evening, giving me my first real lesson in spin

In an excellent start to the evening, got to bus stop, stuck out hand for approaching bus, bus pulled in then didn’t open door, then pulled away again

I’m going to the pub. I may be some time. 🍺

This video is awesome, and this species is the samurai crab, legendary in Japan 🦀🦑 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heikegani