I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Join us on 20 November for the Annual Digital Lecture, a partnership between The National Archives, UK and the School of Advanced Study. The wonderful @nannathylstrup.bsky.social will be speaking about ‘When saving becomes loss: archival memory in the digital age’. Free to register!

Migrants already carry out work for their communities, it’s called ‘having a fucking job’ and it’s mandatory because we aren’t eligible for benefits

In discussion with a computer scientist from the University of Cambridge last night: Me: "you've described some of the things that AI is good at. How would you describe the category of things it's not good at? **pause** Him: "Anything where it has to be right".

It's never occurred to me that it IS an assumption. This is the most astonishing start to a paper I've read in years: "Living organisms are assumed to produce same-species offspring. Here, we report a shift from this norm in Messor ibericus, an ant that lays individuals from two distinct species."

"After the fall of the Roman Empire, elephants virtually disappeared from Western Europe. Since there was no real knowledge of how the animal looked, illustrators had to rely on oral and written transmissions to morphologically reconstruct the elephant" www.uliwestphal.de/elephas-anth...

🗃️ This whole post is considered, eloquent, and full of hope. Really worth reading for its own sake, but also for fellow scholars of the past thinking about how and why all of our work matters

Stunning rare images of polar bear scavenging on a sperm whale captured in the Arctic | National Geographic

The 3,000-year-old gold Shropshire sun pendant was dicovered in 2018. Crafted with incredible skill and decorated with intricate geometric patterns, it symbolizes the importance of the sun in Bronze Age society. As scientific analysis has indicated, the pendant...🧵1/2 📷 me #archaeology 🏺

Are you tired of people constantly overestimating body size of marine reptiles? No longer! We provide equations to estimate body size in ichthyosaurians, mosasaurids, and thalattosuchians. 1/4

Haunting the @nhmlibraryarchives.bsky.social: none other than M. R. James, sitting on the Standing Committee of the Trustees of @nhm-london.bsky.social, presumably as a Trustee of the British Museum. Perhaps thinking about ghosts more than recent acquisitions of Cephalopods and Yoredale Sandstone.

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

Please share widely! The Natural History Museum Denmark @nhmdk.bsky.social is offering a PhD fellowship in collection-based Natural History Research, focused on dark taxa & unknown species, pref. including representatives of Danish flora, fauna or geology. candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

I don't think Peter Mandelson is PM's biggest problem. The biggest problem is not standing up to the literal violent racism on our streets, supercharged by the richest man in the world, and threatening the very fabric of our society. If he and so many commentators can't see this, we're truly lost.

Reminder that 100,000 people marched for Trans Pride in London earlier this year, but because they weren't violent fascists, there was minimal press coverage, unlike the Nazis today. https://www.them.us/story/london-trans-pride-march-turnout-record-uk-transphobia

Something beautiful for the weekend! An extraordinary Acheulean handaxe knapped around a fossil shell c. 500,000-300,000 years ago! The shell’s central display has been described as an example of aesthetic intention by the toolmaker. West Tofts, Norfolk. 📷 MAA Cambridge University #Archaeology

we're on the precipice of a universal antiviral medication, mRNA technology is out here curing cancers every other month, HIV is cureable AND preventable, renewables generate more energy now than fossil fuels worldwide and and more cost-effective, coral reefs are growing back all over the world rn

My lab is running a study to investigate how serendipity relates to information seeking in digital collections. We're looking for researchers & practitioners who have used, designed, or stewarded digital collections to participate in our survey (<10 min): forms.gle/zGJDZZ14vx2M...

I'll be hosting an online event on encountering extinction in the archives with @dollyjorgensen.bsky.social as part of The National Archives' Research Routes series. Come along to hear about researching animal histories in the archive! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/extinction...

Always remember to type "-ai" at the end of all your Google searches. I forgot to this time, and it wasted a ton of water to be as wrong as it could possibly be. The AI revolution is garbage.

#FossilFriday: The 'Oolite and Lias Systems' from 'The Antediluvian World', drawn & engraved by John Emslie (1813–75), published by James Reynolds in 1849. An ichthyosaur & plesiosaur (much influenced by the famous 1840 John Martin plate) try to out-stare a magic-dragonoid pterosaur & Iguanodon.

For #FossilFriday, a 2-for-1 special with a Late Cretaceous body fossil (ammonite) bearing tooth traces of a biting mosasaur matching the dental records of _Platecarpus_. Display seen at the U. of Michigan Museum of Natural History (Ann Arbor MI) in June '24. 🧪🦷🕳️ #ichnology

Research has shown that the use of AI tools such as ChatGPT can lead to poorer critical thinking, problem solving and reasoning skills among its users. Read my new report with @smfthinktank.bsky.social on the risks posed by AI in education: bit.ly/4g7EKUR

I swear I’m going to do this if I get the chance

What research! What a story! It seems the statue of the winged lion in Venice may have been a tomb guardian brought from China by Niccolò & Maffeo Polo - &, once in Venice, it was modified to resemble the Republic’s emblem – the winged lion of St Mark ... www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Ooh we've opened our call for small research grants. £10k for any humanities or social sciences research. Open to independent scholars. We use partial randomisation to allocate the funding: random allocation between all that meet the quality threshold www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/ba-l...

Our website www.ecolplus.fr has a brand-new look ✨ Discover: - the #digitization of French natural history #collections - the equipment available - our partner institutions - a dedicated page for the latest news 👉 And it’s now available in English too!

The internet doesn't have many hi-res images of what is possibly the only image of Steller's sea cow drawn from life (itself a copy of a now-lost sketch), so I'm uploading this version from Stejneger (1936). Very sad that this simple graphic represents the total in vivo art record for this speies.

While defending the luddite argument in Discord, I stumbled into this IMO succinct explanation for opposing generative AI: At every step in the process, it impoverishes us.

A few days ago I learned you can skip the AI summary feature in Google by adding "-AI" to your search. I love it!

Dismal, depressing day. And yet No10 will give a ready quote on some passing celeb fad.

All hail the @waybackmachine.bsky.social! Saver of old published scientific codes, which Elsevier dumped when they bought up Computer & Geosciences. ⚒️ (Seriously, the papers are there, but the codes are not included and linked to a dead website)

I've been worried about this kind of thing for a while. When all our p papers, data and resources are online, what happens when those sites go down? Do any of the big national libraries archive this stuff?

A rare bird in @nhmlibraryarchives.bsky.social. The Natural History Museum's calendar for 1927, featuring a passive aggressive complaint about overcrowding, a call for 'Explorers and others' to collect specimens, and a description of the phoenix (not among the recent acquisitions listed on the back)

Focusing on bats and newts is a cynical attempt to reframe nature as nothing more than a triviality But nature is our life support system Conservation isn't just about helping other species - it's also about maintaining the conditions that allow us to thrive

Calling all Palaeontology PhD candidates and post-docs everywhere! No matter what your particular field of research or country of institution, please follow forms.gle/cLLkEjdLjPrT... and fill in my ANONYMOUS RESEARCH SURVEY – #Yourpalaeolife : investigating fieldwork by early career palaeontologists

I just had to buy this vintage brooch because it uses probably the most unexpected stone I have ever seen in jewellery - nummulitic limestone! It’s probably 1930s and the other stone used is marcasite #decorativestone

For #MosaicMonday this fantastic photo of a mosaic (and a lovely fish 🐟) that was discovered in the submerged ruins of #Roman Baiae. Photo: Parco Archeologico Campi Flegrei

Picture in your mind a shark tooth... We bet this isnt the shape you were thinking of! The shark Ptychodus had a 'pavement' of these strange teeth for crushing hard-shelled prey. Ptychodus fossils have been found all over the world, including from Hessle near Hull. 🏛️ Sedgwick Museum #FossilFriday

The last known Rodrigues parakeet died exactly 150 years ago. This story ticks a lot of natural history museum bingo boxes: ✔️Sex bias in natural history ✔️Colonial legacies ✔️Dodos But also, how museum specimens act as irreplaceable records of lost biodiversity: theconversation.com/the-rodrigue...

I am one of the 14 authors who chose to leave the Polari Prize, and I find myself frustrated and saddened at the way this entire story has been represented. 1/

The Tom Leonard Lectures return for a new season with the fantastic Fossils in t'Hills team. Ever fancied taking a dip into the Jurassic seas of Yorkshire? Find out why this might not have been the most sensible idea…

Sarah Gabbott's @thepalass.bsky.social plenary talk has been living rent free inside my head ever since December so I'm delighted that she's written it up as a Comment for @natecoevo.nature.com: we need taphonomy to understand plastic pollution rdcu.be/eAmRU www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#FindsFriday This mysterious object is made from a slab of whalebone with a hole carved in it It was found at Skara Brae in #Orkney from about 3000BC in the Neolithic, but we have no idea what it was for... Any ideas? 🤔 📸 Mine, in the Skara Brae #Museum #archaeology #museums #scotland 🏺

You've heard about Rail200 this year, but what about Braille200? Our amazing WROCAH placement student @tillyguthrie.bsky.social explains the dual history of Braille and the Railways in Britain: blog.railwaymuseum.org.uk/braille-200/

Mills and Moors, by Charles Ernest Cundall, 1890-1971 (Kirklees Museums and Galleries). #NorthernArt

Web links and websites disappear all the time. But Google’s planned erasure of millions of links at once demonstrates the risks of putting our personal and collective digital histories in Big Tech’s hands. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2... via @shiraovide.bsky.social

Calling all young people in North Craven! Are you aged 16 - 25 and living in North Craven? Are you interested in arts and heritage? Applications for our Young Producers program are now open! apply now via our website thefolly.org.uk/learning/you... or email [email protected]

Happy #YorkshireDay! 130 years ago today Edouard Martel made the 1st descent of Gaping Gill - a 98m deep pothole and cavern in the Yorkshire Dales. He described it as "one of the most extraordinary spectacles it has ever been my pleasure to witness".

can we start a whale fall art train? any other whale fall freaks out there?