Slime mould seen today, steadily engulfing everything in its path, from logs to fences. Despite lacking a brain, slime moulds can solve problems such as finding the shortest path through a maze. Their abilities have been used to inform the planning of road and rail networks.

Found a friend in the forest yesterday. Springtails are some of the most notorious mushroom eaters around and damn most of them are super cute #mushrooms #springtails #macrophotography #fungi

📄 No evidence that haplodiploidy favors the evolution of eusociality 🐝🐜 ⬇️ www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

#WorldHippoDay #Roman mosaic with hippopotamus on display in Naples Archaeological Museum. This is one of the Nile mosaics found in the House of the Faun in the ancient ruined Roman city of #Pompeii. #art #AncientBlueSky

Keep science accessible 🧪

Happy #WorldHippoDay! 🦛❤️ To celebrate here’s a lovely naturalistic painting of a hippo on a small flake of limestone. Painted by an Egyptian artist some 3,500 years ago! 📷 The Met www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti... #Archaeology

One very rotten deciduous log, one very observant iNaturalist community member — and a close-up world hiding in plain sight. Say hello to the white tubelet (Henningsomyces candidus). 📷 cryptomarasmius on iNaturalist 📍 United Kingdom 🔗: www.inaturalist.org/observations... #ObservationOfTheDay

90% of you probably don’t need to read this. But maybe some of you are curious & 10% will feel seen. Or a little less alone. This isn’t about seeking sympathy. It’s about sharing something hard to say out loud; partly to heal, partly in case someone needs to hear it too. (1/3) tinyurl.com/DudinO

Bringing this back up for the International Day of Women in Science, and yes, I consider scientific art, as part of scientific process and communication 🫰

This also applies for Prototaxites btw

Really taken with Haolong dongi, out today from Jiandong Huang, Pascal Godefroit and team. Just submitted news article on it. An iguanodontian with abundant hollow spikes across the neck and body, projecting from among conventional basement scales, and with rows of plate-like scales along the tail.

Reposting this old photo for #FossilFriday: what you are looking at is a fragment of Callixylon wood from the Late Devonian, about 360 million years ago, seen under the microscope. The elongated structures are the conducting cells & there's a hair on the right for scale. 🔬🌿⛏️ #paleobotany

"Saw her in the Amazon With the voltage runnin' through her skin Standin' there with nothin' on She gonna teach me how to swim" for more about the electric (f)eel, check this primer by Ken Catania ⚡ www.cell.com/current-biol... (and yes, finally some current biology in Current Biology)

Founders of modern paleontology, and their contributions to systemic racism, classism and sexism (🧵) Henry Osborn (1857–1935), responsible for naming of Tyrannosaurus & Velociraptor; president of ANHM. Co-founder of the American Eugenics Society. Contributing to books later praised by Hitler.

Opportunity for women students in paleontology! The Winifred Goldring Award will be presented to three women graduate students and the AWG Undergraduate Paleontology Award will be presented to a student pursuing a career in paleontology. Due April 30th. More information here: tinyurl.com/msdc3m68

I've seen fossils in some remarkable places, but this takes the prize: the benthic foram Nummulites in the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza. These massive blocks were quarried from the Eocene Mokkatam Formation when a relictual population of woolly mammoths still lived on Wrangel Island.

Plant Science Research Weekly --  Not a Fungi after all: new clues to the identity of Prototaxites (Science Advances) (Summary by Katarina Kurtović, katarinakurtovic.bsky.social) @sandyheth.bsky.social @transitionalform.bsky.social buff.ly/DwgUr2f #PlantaePSRW

Read all about Diego's hunt for lycophytes around Scotland in this post! 👇👇

Not many animals are the shape of an #echidna, which is a shame. #Tasmania #MammalWatching #WildOz #echidnas

More added 🦕🦖

Dorks

Qikiqtania attempts to prevent brother Tiktaalik from making a terrible mistake. Unlike Tiktaalik, Qikiqtania remained waterbound and could not support its weight on land. #paleoart #SciArt #art #artist #paleontology #artistonbluesky #originalart

Today's lycopsids ("clubmosses") are small plants and do not produce wood but some of their Paleozoic relatives did! This is a detail of the wood cells in a stem of Sigillaria from the Carboniferous of the USA 🔬🌿⛏️ Happy #FossilFriday! #paleobotany #botany

#PlantSci Res Wkly Jan 30 (2/2) plantae.org/plant-scienc... Mechanoperception and defense signaling; Rapid evolutionary gene expression shifts shaped angiosperms; Intergenerational epigenetic acquired nematode resistance; That big, big fossilized organism that probably isn’t fungal after all

Here's the top view of the hat, with baby hippos and Prototaxites!

Bee-hunting beetles are the first animals known to fake the smell of flowers | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Thanks to Sandy for excellent supervision, to the very supportive lab group (who are also very creative with making my hat!) and the examiners for their rigorous questioning!

The very first Dr from the group! Congratulations Laura @transitionalform.bsky.social @instmolplantsci.bsky.social for passing your viva yesterday!! 🎉🎉 Thanks so much @seanhmcmahon.bsky.social and Paul Kenrick for acting as examiners

An excellent explainer of our new preprint from James Robinson of the multiverses.xyz podcast!

Important message here: 4 billion years of evolution was not teleological. It was not _meant_ to get to us or our world. It was doing it own thing in its own time #Biodiversity www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-g...

For this #FernFriday and #FossilFriday, let's look at Symplocopteris wyatti, an early fern from the Carboniferous of Australia 🌿⛏️. This #fern formed trees with "false trunks" up to 50 cm in diameter, composed of several branching stems intertwined with petioles and roots #paleobotany 🧵1/3

It’s been amazing to receive so much interest in the Prototaxites paper! An absolute highlight was talking about the work last night to Jane Hill on BBC R4, The World Tonight The Prototaxites segment starts at 33 mins 👇👇 www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

It's been great seeing everyone enjoying the paper and the thread! Just to add: 1 ) It's pronounced "Proto-tax-eye-tees" (not that it would mind being mispronounced) 2 ) Yes it does look like giant penis, but more interesting is that we don't know why or how it got to looking like a giant penis.

You can also enjoy the TikTok version of this story here: www.tiktok.com/@scientifica...

Meet the mysterious Prototaxites: “No matter what...it’s something weird doing its own thing,” one scientist says of the fossil

Birds have a thick retina devoid of blood vessels - so how do they ensure sufficient oxygen availability? They don't - neurons rely on glycolysis, metabolizing glucose released from the pecten. Insane new study that includes comparative data on lizards and crocs.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fossil reveals secrets of entirely different form of life no longer found on Earth

It was a joy to contribute to this paper led by @sandyheth.bsky.social, Corentin Loron and Laura Cooper. We show the Devonian fossil, Prototaxites, is not a fungus but is in fact an organism from an as yet unknown extinct eukaryotic lineage. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @dcu-lsi.bsky.social

Very cool paper and thread exploring earth's ancient giant fungi-not-fungi "the first giant organisms on the Earth’s surface were not closely related to anything alive today. But despite its strangeness, in its time Prototaxites would have had an important role"

Really exciting to get some press coverage on our Prototaxites paper @instmolplantsci.bsky.social @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

See also nice summary here in @science.org: www.science.org/content/arti...

Great thread on our big new paper about Prototaxites. We set out to investigate whether these iconic (and sometimes huge) fossils were fungi. Not only are they not fungi, they represent a lost lineage of eukaryotes and an independent origin of complex multicellularity. Crazy!

Ol' Four-Eyes is Back: the earliest fishes had four image-forming eyes - paper in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Prototaxites is a taxon close to my heart, as it was the first organism we reconstructed in VFX for my first major TV project, Earth, back in 2022. So cool to learn it may have sat on an entirely unknown branch of life!

Excited to share our new investigation of Prototaxites! We found no support for a fungal affinity and instead suggest it is best considered an entirely extinct complex eukaryotic lineage Great team effort @transitionalform.bsky.social Corentin Loron, and many others! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

It was great talking with Cody Cottier for an article on our work for Scientific American! www.scientificamerican.com/article/myst...

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below! Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

Six years ago today 🌿 Aseroe rubra, the Anemone Stinkhorn Fungus, thrives on the rot of the forest floor on the Waihe’e Ridge trail. One of the stranger things I’ve seen, it should be called the Mind Flayer I think.