ooooh new paper out today. a couple of years ago a big group of us were like "hey let's spend a few weeks painstakingly looking up the sources of every official bird common name" and as of today, you too can join us in our ornitholetymological (yes i made that up) rabbit-hole:

The American Southwest is home to extremely adorable undescribed species. If you are able, consider chipping in a penny to help them get described! experiment.com/projects/und...

My science communication pet peeve is people always putting photos of needles or a person being actively vaccinated as the photos to go alongside articles about vaccine hesitancy etc. when it's an extremely common phobia trigger that does not help the case for vaccines at all.

Silly #birds thought to break up your feed: there've been many discussions about what the most beautiful bird song is (e.g. Winter Wren, Hermit Thrush), but what do you think is the ugliest, most ear-grating bird song? I would like to contend: Yellow-headed Blackbird. Can anyone beat this?

Exactly! Before transgenic bacteria that can basically 3D print human insulin, patients were treated with insulin from slaughtered livestock. Cow/pig insulin didn't work very well and many people were allergic to it and couldn't take it. They simply died.

Amid today’s massive NIH cuts to universities, please know that my research colleagues: - Develop new cancer treatments for kids - Are curing sickle cell disease - Build new tech to help premature babies survive - Prevent teens from dying of drug overdose - And more #NIH #MedSky #research #science

🧵 🔭 🧪 1/ An international research team has discovered a new giant radio galaxy dubbed “Inkathazo,” meaning “trouble” in African languages such as Xhosa and Zulu. Source➡️ sarao.ac.za/news/the-age... The discovery, obtained using South Africa's Meerkat interferometer, offers new insights into

Lewis Howard Latimer 9/4/1848– 12/11/1928 was an American inventor and patent draftsman. His inventions included an evaporative air conditioner, an improved process for manufacturing carbon filaments for electric light bulbs, and an improved toilet system for railroad cars. #Blackhistorymonth

Happy #WorldWetlandsDay to all who celebrate. Wetlands help reduce climate change impacts, they sustain the water we drink, and they support an amazing diversity of wildlife. In short: wetlands rock 🌿

If you have been affected by the fires in LA, or are concerned about your ability to keep precious Drosophila strains going during the latest funding crisis, we will host your strains as a backup. Please email me. Please amplify. If you are also able to host fly strains, add your name as well.

The Bristle-thighed Curlew range is because they saw one of those maps with Alaska and Hawaii next to each other and thought it would be a reasonable migration, only to realize it was a huge mistake, but there's no going back now.

You are being inspected by a Plate-billed Mountain Toucan so act accordingly. 🪶 #ArtAdventCalendar

Sharks eating dinosaurs! At the charming National Museum in Prague. Totally morbid paleoart. But based on one of the few Czech dinosaur fossils, an ornithopod bone crisscrossed with the razor blade bites of sharks.

Reminds me of middle school algebra--my classmate frustratedly asked the teacher WHY we had to keep solving for the variable when the teacher already KNEW the answer! Who knew, she was ahead of her time :')

For #MammalMonday let's look at the Eastern Chipmunk. Infinitely easier to identify compared to the Western species since out here we only have the one. "Chipmunk" is an Anglicization of Ojibwe "ajidamoonh," meaning "head first," or "one who descends trees headlong." An apt name to be sure.

A watercolour illustration I've just completed featuring the Canary Island endemic succulent, Euphorbia handiensis:

Sorry about the late reply, currently being swamped by emails. The emails:

Day 7 of #ArtAdventCalendar: a little ringed plover a-walking! #birds #digitalart

WRITER OF 'WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS': And then we end on wishing them a happy new year, and that's the song 😊 FIGGY PUDDING MARKETING DEPARTMENT: Great! Just one minor suggestion

Someone having a bit of fun with it at the NYT crossword desk. I could hear it 😂

Completed at last. My heinous gift guide for sworn enemies. Enjoy this curated list of cursed objects. Bequeath one to your detested foe! open.substack.com/pub/holapapi...

I just love the ways bugs try not to be found. Here's a Phytocoris lichen-mimic plant bug from Texas, if you can see it. #Miridae

Portrait 4 in the series is "The clarity of untangling the threads (portrait of a stitch artist) Sue Spence" thread painting - hand embroidery artwork. #portraitartist #HandStitch #StitchArt #FigurativeArt #artist #art

I love this! Going down the rabbit hole and finding things no one else could gives me so much joy... as long as I'm not the one who misplaced the thing in the first place, because who likes searching for car keys?

Just another #MallardMonday. Here's a Mallard hen shaking off after washing herself. Did you know that Mallards are the bird species with the highest recorded number of species its produced offspring with (39!!!!)?

Good morning. Here's a little jelly mushroom (Leotia species). This little guy is an #Ascomycete, meaning that it's more closely related to the #yeast in a pizza crust than it is to the #mushroom slices on top. Is it too early for pizza? I want pizza.

this has to be the prettiest cladogram i've ever seen! #botany #plantscience #phylogeny #sciart #twitterrepost

As I share around this time of year, the various derived features on the turkey skeleton, and where they first emerge on the phylogeny of dinosaurs:

Quando eu clico em "rejeitar cookies"

Here's something a bit #goblincore. I found a fallen pair of Mourning Cloak butterfly wings silently resting on a hummock of moss. Mourning Cloaks are actually among the longest-lived butterflies, hibernating through freezes, living up to a year.

It's the sacred duty of every American to save Europeans from making the classic touring-the-USA blunder which is assuming that something that's an 11 hour drive away will totally be a doable day trip.

Great evidence that posting weird bugs in iNaturalist really does help us do a better job detecting invasive species. entomologytoday.org/2024/11/19/c...

Here's a two-for-one #wasp pic. Left: double-banded scoliid wasp. Right: eastern tawny-horned spider wasp. They both pollinate flowers, but they also kill and parasitize other arthropods. The scoliid specializes on #beetles, and I'm sure you can guess what the #spider wasp goes after!

Not all #butterflies go for nectar. Commas (left) and question marks (right) much prefer animal dung, carrion, and rotting fruit. I have seen them feeding on a squirrel carcass and on dog poo. Nature is so beautiful.

If anyone wants a collection of comparison photos of #birds and other organisms, check out this crowdsourced project on iNaturalist: www.inaturalist.org/projects/spe...

Hey all! Post your #birds comparison photos if ya got em! Here's my black vs brown noddy (black is on the left: smaller body, colder-cast plumage).

It finally happened I got a YELLOWLEGS COMPARISON PHOTO

"Yes, I can fly." #birds 📷 🪶

Happy #ThursJay. Enjoy this Steller's Jay from the contact zone between the interior and coastal subspecies. The phenotype is interior with the white "eyebrow," but genetically, who knows? If the interior and coastal jays are elevated to species, not sure what will happen to these guys. 🪶 #birds

It is so important to read widely. Not only may you discover amazing work from outside your comfort zone (or bad work that inspires you), it's the only way (as a reader) to cultivate your own taste, not just being told what you should or should not read or enjoy by other people. Read omnivorously!

Cretaceous echinoderm in the Glen Rose limestone in central Texas. How nice to spot this beautiful specimen just sticking out of an outcrop. It’s been buried in the dark for 100 million years and it’s still intact.

PNAS, "Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A." for short,

A bird nest is more like a baby crib than a home.

The Anatomy of a Borb. By fluffing up their feathers, they trap tiny pockets of air close to their bodies, which acts as insulation. Helping them regulate their temperature.

I brought this to read, thinking I'd be sitting in the juror waiting area all day before being sent home. Two pages in and I was hooked, sealing my fate: I was promptly selected as a jury member and told No Outside Reading Materials.

Pretty much exactly a year ago I found and photographed my first globular springtail, and since then I've been completely obsessed. I've photographed over 800 springtail individuals now, and there's still so much out there to discover! This one is about 2mm, and is one of many undescribed species

I hate that “going the way of the dodo” means going extinct… it should mean being kind and cute and interesting… as dodos doubtlessly were…

I'm not going to disclose the number of seconds it took me to realize that the pipette tip I was using was defective and sealed at the end and THAT'S why nothing was getting sucked into it. But it may have been more than one.

I believe these are split-gill mushrooms (Schizophyllum commune), which is the one you may have heard of as having more than 20,000 different sex types. They are sexually incompatible with sex types similar or identical to their own, preventing crosses with siblings and other close relatives.