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….

Ants rolling off the assembly line. Our exhibition Ants: Tiny Creatures, Big Lives opens this fall.

Ever leave raspberries uncovered in the freezer? That’s what this thomsonite with mesolite overgrowth specimen brings to mind. On view at the Bruce Museums Robert R Wiener Mineral Gallery. Happy #MineralMonday!

Some Blanche Lazzell inspired art this weekend at the Bruce Museum. Phoebe did a cat and Michael made a forest. Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist is at the Bruce Museum through April 27.

Visited SUNY Stony Brook for the NERVES Symposium yesterday, which was amazing. Equally amazing, this inhabitable art, with shelves full of natural history goodness. Curated by Jinyoung Jin, at the Charles B. Wang Center, and designed and presented by Project Group GREEM.

One of my favorite Cretaceous critters is Hyphalosaurus, best described as a Loch Less monster that you could keep in a bath tub. Thousands have been found in China, some with soft tissue. I worked on this amazing specimen with Keqin Gao. Art by Kristin Lamm brings it to life! Happy #FossilFriday

Carrot cake or mineral marvel? This double layer of gypsum was formed over the course of two evaporation events at Chinkapook Lake in Victoria, Australia. On view at the Bruce Museums Robert R Wiener Mineral Gallery. #MineralMonday

Our Postosuchus back in 2017 when he took part in Last Days of Pangea and today, reposed as a floodplain carcass in our permanent Natural Cycles exhibition. happy #FossilFriday

A little Bruce Museum history. The receding glacier model in the foreground was made by Paul Griswold Howes in 1906. The one in the background is by Sean Murtha, made in 2024.

Halite hopper crystals for #MineralMonday! We sometimes forget salt can form beautiful crystals. Hoppering occurs when a crystal’s edges grow faster than the face centers, creating a step-like lattice. You can see the same effect in ice. On view at the Bruce Museum’s Robert R Wiener Mineral Gallery.

Happy #MineralMonday! Here are some beauties in the “Tiny Treasures” case at the Bruce Museum’s Robert R. Wiener Mineral Gallery. We needed to give beauties their own space since many of the other cases are filled with such large specimens.

An interesting bird for #FossilFriday. This is the holotype of Cyrilavis colburnorum. This species and its relatives were once thought to be early parrots due to their parrot-like foot (with reversed fourth toe).

My high school senior picture

One thing I truly enjoy is minerals that look like food. Feeling like this fluorite is a tower of Jello cubes.

Jiji was reading on his own this morning. So proud!

Sage Journals need to tighten up their targeting at least a little….

Here are two of my best bird buds - Eofringillirostrum parvulum from Germany and Eofringillirostrum boudreauxi from the US. Tiny little finch-beaked stem passerines from the Eocene. They were eating small seeds BEFORE it was cool! #FossilFriday

It’s finally opening day! On Thin Ice: Alaska’s Warming Wilderness is now open to the public at the Bruce Museum. Come learn about how the landscape is shifting in the Arctic meet the amazing animals that inhabit these ecosystems.

The gang is waiting! On Thin Ice: Alaska’s Warming Wilderness is open to Bruce Museum Members today and opens to all tomorrow.

Tenrec Tuesday. Throwback to our 2015 exhibition Madagascar: Ghosts of the Past when we created what I assume must be the worlds only tenrec themed board game.

A little preview of what we are cooking up for later this year. @economo.bsky.social’s lab has shared some mazing scans of ants so we can print them scaled up and bring them to life. Can’t wait to see how this Thaumatomyrmex turns out after our artist Sean Murtha paints her!