The tree is decorated and the table is set. Merry Christmas everyone!

The Christmas cake is finished! This year I was back on decorating duty and opted for a ‘spotless rose’ design.

The day before Christmas Eve and @janetahlberg.bsky.social is knitting a Christmas stocking following video instructions from Tom Daley.

Melanie and her freshwater mosasaur on the Dutch evening news! 🧪

Saint Lucy’s Day, 13 December, means baking ‘lussekatter’ - ‘Lucy’s Cats’ - which are soft, sweet saffron buns made into shapes the significance of which is lost in antiquity. Just out of the oven! I wish 🦋 had smell-o-vision.

New paper out with the inimitable @melanieduring.com: giant mosasaurs haunted the rivers of end-Cretaceous North America! 🧪 link.springer.com/epdf/10.1186...

A 3-minute explanation of our freshwater mosasaur study: youtu.be/tn8lE65GmHs?...

It also means T.rex 🦖was not the only predator to fear in the Hell Creek..... You can read the full study here: rdcu.be/eUit1 Let me know what you think! @uppsalauni.bsky.social @vuamsterdam.bsky.social @ndgspaleo.bsky.social Eastern West Virginia Community and Technical College

The mosasaur’s shift from marine to freshwater isn’t unique. Similar transitions can be seen today in animals like river dolphins🐬and saltwater crocodiles.🐊This study offers a new understanding of mosasaurs, revealing how they adapted to changing habitats.

This discovery also sheds light on the Earth’s changing environments. The Western Interior Seaway (WIS), where mosasaurs once thrived, gradually became more freshwater. As sea level dropped, rivers began dominating the basin, likely causing the formation of a halocline.

We found similar freshwater signatures in other mosasaur teeth from nearby, slightly older sites. This proves that mosasaurs were adapting to river environments during the final million years before their extinction. #Climatechange #Adaptation

The mosasaur tooth we found is big—belonging to a creature that could grow up to 11 meters long! That's the size of a bus! 🚍 An apex predator in rivers, not seas! #Giantrivermonster

Interestingly, the carbon isotopes suggest the mosasaur may have even fed on drowned dinosaurs! This adds a whole new layer to what we thought we knew about these apex predators. #Freshwatermosasaur

Analyses of oxygen, strontium, and carbon isotopes in the tooth enamel showed a clear freshwater signature. This mosasaur didn’t dive deep like its marine cousins but instead roamed river environments. #Adaptation #evolution

As Nathan van Vranken and @boydpaleo.bsky.social were describing the specimen, they invited me on board to analyse the tooth’s isotopes together with Suzan Warmerdam-Verdegaal, @perahlberg.bsky.social and Jeroen van der Lubbe. The results? This mosasaur lived in freshwater, not the sea! #Isotopes

In 2022, Trissa Shaw from @ndgspaleo.bsky.social found a huge mosasaur tooth in North Dakota, alongside fossils of a T. rex 🦖 and a crocodylian 🐊 . This discovery raised an intriguing question: what was a sea-dwelling mosasaur doing in a river? 🤔 #HellCreek #NorthDakota

Mosasaurs, the giant marine reptiles that roamed the Earth more than 66 million years ago, didn’t just live in the sea. Our new research shows that they could thrive in freshwater too! Let’s dive into what we’ve discovered. #Paleontology #Mosasaurs

In other news, a South African radio observatory has captured the first image of the Daemon-Sultan Azathoth, who bubbles and blasphemes at the centre of infinity: www.sarao.ac.za/media-releas...

In Stockholm for a wonderful concert of English renaissance music performed by a recorder consort. Then on to the atmospheric Christmas market in the Old Town:

In Paris, and able to visit the restored Notre Dame for the first time. Its survival was nothing short of a miracle - I watched the whole fire in real time on a hotel TV in Florence, hoping against hope that the vaults would hold and the windows survive. They did.

Three sharks are killed every second - Europe’s trade in shark meat is driving them toward extinction. Let’s ban shark products once and for all. Sign now! action.wemove.eu/sign/2025-11...

🧪 I am pleased to announce that I have been elected a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Division of Earth Sciences.

Leicester has long been one of the leading universities nationally for palaeontology & geology - this would be a terrible loss, as would the loss of other subjects such as modern languages: www.change.org/p/save-geolo...

This morning, autumn presents a Yellow Window and a Red Window outside my kitchen.

Publication alert!🧪 Major new volume on early tetrapods and Carboniferous palaeoenvironments. The festschrift for Tim Smithson has just been published by Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh. Most articles are open access. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Right now: aurora over my house!

Autumn in the garden. The pond vegetation is settling into tousled senescence, but behind it the giant Veronica vies with a self-seeded hazel for brightest autumn colour.

"President" Trump, speaking just now to the assembled generals of the US military, has just declared war on his own people (quotes from the Guardian's news feed): Talking about Democrat-led cities like San Francisco, Chicago, New York and LA: “They’re very unsafe places and

Out in the forest picking mushrooms today. Great success: porcini, hedgehog fungus, yellow chanterelles, funnel chanterelles…but now I have to clean them all.

Highly recommended! Hanna’s team is doing ground-breaking research, Stockholm is a lovely city, and a Swedish PhD position is very attractive - an actual job with paid holidays, sick leave, parental leave and pension rights.

Amazing TV coverage today of the church in the mining town of Kiruna in Lapland being moved to allow expansion of the mine. It will move 1.5 km at a slow walking pace. So far, everything is going well.

Approaching Drottningholm.

Today’s outing: by century-old steamer from Stockholm to Drottningholm Palace, there to see Telemann’s wonderful opera “Orpheus” at the 18th century court theatre.

Back in Uppsala, and at last this is turning into a descent butterfly summer! Lots of action in the garden today. Here's a small copper, Lycaena phlaeas, feeding on a coneflower.

A timeline cleanser for those who need one: a small waterfall on the flank of Meall Mor, Glen Coe, Scotland, filmed today. There are still places like this.

Live update from the foot of the Glencoe Radio Mast, altitude about 400 m.

I'm holidaying in Oban on the West Coast of Scotland, just as the country is battered by Storm Floris barreling in from the Atlantic. But the weather has its compensations: a storm petrel (Hydrobates pelagicus) is feeding just below our living-room window!

The hoverflies have decided to adopt our white amaryllis as their new clubhouse.

More water lilies! I make no excuse, because this is the best show I've ever had.

AI “thinks” in the same way a mirror looks at you

Yesterday I went out with my telephoto to try to capture some different aspects of life in and around the pond. Here's a frog, Rana temporaria, hiding under kingcup leaves at the edge of the water.

Not such a great photo because these are difficult to capture, but the other great joy of my pond at the moment is water plantain (Alisma plantago-aquatica), a European native. Rosettes of emergent leaves and upright flower stalks bearing clouds of small white flowers.

Two more flowers of James Brydon, because why not. And here’s a possible surprise for North American readers: would you believe, my latitude is equivalent to the northern tip of Labrador? Strange but true. 🌱🌱🌱

At last, both my water lilies are flowering! Pink ‘James Brydon’ and off-white ‘Arc en Ciel’.

Now that everyone's back home from #EAVP22, I would just like to comment on the offensive claim by David Marjanović that I was "hiding" in Uppsala and had sent my junior lab members instead, supposedly because I was too afraid to face criticism of our recent paper in Nature on the earliest 1/3 🧪

If anyone needs a timeline cleanser as an antidote to the unfolding horror of US politics, I can share some images from today’s visit to York Minster, one of the greatest gothic cathedrals. 13th to 15th century. Here’s the west front. 🧵

Even linkedin gets it

High Force, Teesdale. Biggest waterfall by volume in Britain. The lip is created by the basalt of the Great Whin Sill, overlying Carboniferous sandstone and limestone.

On the Pennine Way in Northumberland. Spectacular landscape underlain by Carboniferous rocks. A block by the path suddenly reveals a Stigmaria root from a giant Lepidodendron tree that grew in a coal swamp more than 300 million years ago. 🧵

On holiday in the Pentland Hills of Scotland. Dramatic landscapes and delicate orchids (Dactylorhiza maculata).