Some little guys pack a BUG punch! Our exhibition Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives showcases weapons like stingers, venom, and formic acid that ants use to defend themselves and then see how species stack up on the STING METER. Bruce Museum: Ant Battle youtube.com/shorts/-p5C6...

My life is greatly improved by finding out that you can turn off the horrible system in Word that forces you to activate every comment and go on the scavenger hunt when "Another comment is in progress". Preferences / General /uncheck Enable modern comments.

BHL is such an amazing resource. And reading these papers can be so entertaining as well as informative. Perfect image for this post too!

Happy #InternationalPolarBearDay from my favorite bear, Charlie! He was the centerpiece of our exhibition On Thin Ice: Alaska's Warming Wilderness. Can't wait for the next time we can display this beautiful bear at the Bruce Museum.

Just in time for #FossilFriday, meet Rhynchaeites mcfaddeni, a little fossil ibis from the Green River Formation. The holotype looks delightfully like a hieroglyph! Published today in Journal of Paleontology shorturl.at/qTUVi

Don't forgot your fossil friends on Penguin Awareness Day. Here's the skull of Eudyptes warhami, an extinct crested penguin from the Chatham Islands. Its such an interesting species that it's features on a NZ coin! Read more here: fossilpenguins.wordpress.com/2019/02/05/a...

Happy Penguin Awareness Day! Here's a throwback to our 2023 exhibition Penguins, Past and Present. We are celebrating at the Bruce Museum today with a special 10 question Penguin Round at tonight's Bruce Museum Trivia. Meet us at 6pm for pizza, drinks, and prizes!

Our little buddy Eudyptula wilsonae made BBC's Wildlife Magazine's 10 Cutest Prehistoric Animals Ever list! shorturl.at/svdjo Reconstruction of this fossil fluffball by Simone Giovanardi. Here's the original paper by Daniel Thomas, @atennyson.bsky.social, Felix Marx & myself: shorturl.at/BSGYF

For #MineralMonday, take a peek at our lovely canvasite. This is one of my favorite pieces in our Tiny Treasures case. The blue coloring comes from vanadium, but what makes this mineral so special to me is have the clusters look soft like fluffy little cotton balls!

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm thankful for Centuriavis lioae, a 10 million year old fossil relative of turkeys. It was a lot of fun describing this stunning specimen with Catherine Early, Kate Dzikiewicz, and Amy Balanoff. The fossil is named after our amazing museum colleague Suzanne Lio.

Come at me bro! Did you know ants can ward off elephants that attack their acacia tree homes? Learn how ants and plants work form mutualistic relationships in Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives at the Bruce Museum. On view through May 17th. @brucemuseum.bsky.social

Our little birdy made the cover of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Amazing how a bird sank to the bottom of Fossil Lake 51 million years ago and ended up entombed in sediments that perfectly match the background color/texture of the journal. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives is officially open at the Bruce Museum! Enter the tunnel and you will meet "Buckley", our five foot long scaled-up Dinoponera ant. Buckley is named after her creator, the great Dan Buckley. The smaller ant is my daughter, dressed as an alate queen for the opener.

Wonderful tribute to Mark Norell by Peter Makovicky, Jim Clark, and Steve Brusatte: Mark Norell (1957–2025): Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

Get ready to enter the tunnel and explore the realm of natures tiny dynamos. Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives opens November 13th at the Bruce Museum!

This weekend is the last chance to see Charlie the Polar Bear and all his Arctic pals in On Thin Ice: Alaska's Warming Wilderness at the Bruce Museum Saturday and Sunday we host our 43rd Annual Outdoor Arts Festival, so make it a double play Bruce weekend! @brucemuseum.bsky.social

Proud to share a new piece in Scientific American co-authored with the brilliant @lnwilson.bsky.social , edited by @katewong.bsky.social, and featuring this spectacular depiction of the endless daylight of the Cretaceous summer in Alaska by Chase Stone! www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...

October is here and nothing sets the Halloween mood like some spessartine on black quartz! On view in the Robert R. Wiener Mineral Gallery at the Bruce Museum. Happy #MineralMonday!

Often tempted to change the locality of this spectacular selenite specimen to Fortress of Solitude. On view in the Robert R. Wiener Mineral Gallery at the Bruce Museum. Happy belated #MineralMonday

On #FossilFriday I am proud to share a new discovery - a skull of a large extinct relative of king and emperor penguins. @atennyson.bsky.social, Daniel Thomas, Felix Marx, and I report this magnificent skull in Journal of Paleontology: https:// bit.ly/4ne3HQV

The Bruce Museum hosted the Federal Duck Stamp Contest last year and it was honestly one of the most enjoyable 48 hours of my tenure at the museum. Here’s my thoughts on why this program is so crucial and the energy of being in the room for the judging.

Thrilled to be at the Patuxent Research Refuge for the judging of the 2025 Federal Duck Stamp contest. This program conserves millions of acres of wetland habitat and brings out the best in wildlife art!

Preparations for Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives are kicking into high gear! You know we gotta have honeypot ants, and Sean Murtha is crafting some juicy ones. Meanwhile Dan Buckley is creating a super-sized 5 foot long Dinoponera. Opening in October at the Bruce Museum!

Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives is going to be epic! Here is a Dolichoderus ant tending hemipteran ants, combining 3D prints and the magic of Sean Murtha. Meet this ant and over 70 of her friends this November at the Bruce Museum!

Are you very different from your sibling? Gypsum comes in forms, all with same chemical structure. In the Bruce Museum’s Robert R. Wiener Mineral Gallery you can see ram’s horn gypsum side by side with a selenite crystal. Same mineral formed under different conditions! Happy #MineralMonday!

Who is this beautiful little bird? Consoravis turdirostris is a new species from the famous Fossil Lake deposits of Wyoming. The name Consoravis means "companion bird", forming a phonetic group with the closely related Morsoravis ("Mors bird") and Sororavis ("sister bird").

So happy to finally order my 2025-2026 Federal Duck Stamp (two actually) today! Duck Stamp image credit: US Fish and Wildlife Service @usfws

Green pyromorphite is perhaps more widely known but my favorite example of this mineral is this sparkling yellow beauty from the Bunker Hill Mine in Idaho. On view at the Robert R. Wiener Mineral Gallery at the Bruce Museum. Happy #MineralMonday

Ready for tiny birds from above the Arctic Circle? Our new paper on the Cretaceous origins of Arctic nesting drops today in Science. This project was led by @lnwilson.bsky.social‬ and features amazing fossils recovered by Pat Druckenmiller’s field program in the Prince Creek Formation of Alaska.

Its CRETACEOUS ARCTIC BABY BIRD time!

The 2023 SAPE volume is now published thanks to the legendary efforts of Kiko Serrano: www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu... Feeling low key like I made it, this is my first appearance in an old school numbered conference photo.

Hanging with my buddy in the Bruce Museum natural history galleries!

Tiny kingdom in a geode. Quartz from Sidi Rahal, Morocco. On view in the Robert R Wiener Mineral Gallery at the Bruce Museum. Happy #MineralMonday

One of the most wonderful things about museum careers is that my kids throw themselves into learning about whatever the current and upcoming exhibitions will be about. As we prepare for Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives Phoebe and I have been monitoring this nest on the sidewalk every day.

Blast from the past - putting together our Postosuchus cast for Last Days of Pangea back in 2016. #FossilFriday

Love the way the Yale Peabody Museum put this coelacanth in a little cave. There’s going to be a generation of kids with the memory of scrambling under there. Great design!

Counting grebe vertebrae in the Yale Peabody Museum collections and stumbled upon a Marsh specimen!

Love how this quartz from the Collier Creek Mine looks like it provides a strong power up in some video game. Happy #MineralMonday!

It’s #FossilFriday so enjoy this fossil evidence of a failed game of Frogger!

Cremastocheilus beetles sneaks into ant nests to eat eggs and pupae. Despite looking nothing like its victims, the beetle can trick ants into accepting it by coating itself with pheromones. Model by Sean Murtha, photo by Paul Mutino

Back in 2015 I curated Secrets of Fossil Lake at the Bruce Museum. This was a dream exhibition - the fossils are exquisite and the matching tones of the bones and rock plus (usually) perfectly rectangular slabs make for such aesthetically pleasing displays.

Love this calcite from Alzada, MT. Reminds me of deep sea hydrothermal vents in miniature. One view in the Robert R Wiener Mineral Gallery at the Bruce Museum. #MineralMonday

When the kids school asked for volunteers for Penguin Literacy Night I called in a favor from Kairuku. Great time with the wonderful Whitney Whale community!

Ka-boom! This calcite specimen kind of looks like a cartoon explosion. Part of are “Calcite, the Ultimate Shapeshifter” display in the Robert R. Wiener Mineral Gallery. Happy #Mineral Monday!

Since it’s #WorldPenguinDay we decided to give our buddy Kairuku a walk! This model of the Oligocene giant penguin Kairuku was created by @chalkychicken.bsky.social for our 2023 show Penguins, Past and Present. Kairuku was endemic to New Zealand and over a foot taller than modern emperor penguins.

Our latest Science exhibition is featured in this terrific write up by Shivani Vora for the New York Times! On Thin Ice: Alaska’s Warming Wilderness is up through October 19th. Come check it out at the Bruce Museum! www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/a...

Lower Level of the Bruce Museum is where all the good stuff happens! Ant nest at 20x scale in progress by Sean Murtha.

Me trying to stop people from paying >$1000 to some random pseudoscientific publisher for a flimsy "peer-review" and a barely formatted PDF.

It’s 2025 why are we still submitting tables as separate files and not embedded in the manuscript?

As a paleontologist who writes a lot of species descriptions with figures of dozens of fossil bones, the remove background tool in Photoshop probably could have saved me a solid year writing my dissertation….