Thomas Jefferson's Megalodon tooth for #FossilFriday. Interestingly, not the only Meg tooth in the ANSP collections formerly owned by a notable historic figure...

sometimes a news photo is also a Far Side cartoon

Big day today. This post will make sense in a few years

How much do you need to change temprature to start a mass extinction? To learn from Earth's history, magnitudes larger than 5.2 °C and rates higher than 10 °C/Myr (our current rate of change is ~8,620 °C/Myr). 🧪⚒️ Link:​ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25019-2

On the continuing relevance of 1960s Doctor Who: @lizbethmyles.bsky.social on The Mind Robber and LLMs. The parallels are striking.

Longrich, N.R.; Makovicky, P.J.; Tokaryk, T.; Cooper, D.M.L.; Saitta, E.T.; Erickson, G.M.; Szekely, T.; Snively, E. Hatchlings of Tyrannosaurus rex and the Evolution of Dinosaur Reproductive Strategies. Biology 2026, 15, 1090. doi.org/10.3390/biol...

Charles R. Knight was so great at granting his prehistoric animals a sense of life, but I'm also a huge fan of the landscapes that he put them in. They remind me of old paintings of the American West that attempted to blend the mythic and the knowable. It nurtures the subjects of the paleoart.

We're in the world, not against it.

New from The Natural History Museum -- The Other 250, a counter-atlas which "shows how place-names shape past and present struggles over land, power, and belonging, and holds the histories that official commemoration works to sanitize or suppress." wordsaremonuments.org/the-other-250/

Wait everyone shut up for a second: the discovery of the Brachiosaurus holotype is at the exact midpoint between the founding of the United States and today (July 4, 1901)

A New Declaration of Independence by Emma Goldman originally published in 1909 read here: theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma...

i'm a philadelphian

danny briere after a sixers gm actually starts making moves instead of trading nfts all day

HOLD THE LINE

Sandy the Pachycephalosaurus* in the spotlight for #FossilFriday. The original skeleton is on display in Japan *terms and conditions (Stygimoloch) apply

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

It's hot in McKinney

PRUDENCE II (1997) Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 12” x 13” Another take on what the ancient Greeks called "the Queen of the Virtues." The one most essential to our collective future, yet the one least evident in human affairs. 1/2

For those who enjoy academic squabbles, the stratigraphers remain the most heated I know: www.theatlantic.com/science/arch... (Yes, paywall, because journalists deserve to be paid. Lots of libraries have access to The Atlantic and being a library patron helps libraries get paid, too. Win-win!)

Mr. LeBron James...you have lived a full and varied life. But have you seen a man eat a rotisserie chicken on an industrial pier? Have you met an Elmo who drums? Have you scaled a greased pole atop the shoulders of other men?

Daniel Briere pick up Giroux tonight and my life is yours

It's been far too long since Tylosaurus news...so here's another NEW TYLOSAURUS PAPER! 🦎 From me & Mike² (Everhart & Polcyn) For the first time in over 150 years, the holotype of Tylosaurus proriger is fully described & figured in detail. Incredible artwork by Andrey Atuchin

▾ Dithering Options… ◦ Floyd–Steinberg ◦ Sierra ◦ Atkinson ◦ Bayer 2x2 ◦ Bayer 4x4 • Sapir–Whorf (current)

5-4 on the existence of the 14th amendment is straight up constitutional crisis territory. If SCOTUS can nuke entire parts of the constitution on a whim that’s game over.

Not the point and not going to sway anyone, but as someone who has a degree in (among other things) biological anthropology, I just want to point out that the argument that there is only a gender binary is complete and utter bunk, the sort of thing that gets demolished in a 101 course on this stuff.

“The Supreme Court ruled that trans people can be banned from public life and that there’s no limits to how much money can be dumped into politics, but it also ruled 5-4 that birthright citizenship isn’t dead yet so it’s really more good than bad for Democrats”

Theyve mobilized faster against this than anything in the past 10 years and to me that pretty much says it all and justifies what so many have said about them collectively for anyone willing to pay attention

Correcting AI generated alt text captions for 28 figures is a new found way to waste my time: I’d have been very happy to provide these myself if requested, rather than having to rewrite this computer generated totally useless drivel

This is pretty much it.

1/12 🚨🚨 I am so excited to share chapter 1 of my dissertation, now preprinted here: biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We ask if are their fundamental, shared mechanisms that stop us from inferring the relationship of species and their timescale of divergence #biology #science

if a person is sentenced to 100 years in prison for being anti fascist in america then america is a fascist country

The year is 2026 and enthusiasts on Twitter are still completely misunderstanding the Toroceratops hypothesis

Much like British television shows are said to pass the same dozen actors back and forth, British VFX studios of the 2000s would pass around the same six dinosaur models to each other

They found a moribund Indonesian coelacanth in shallow waters in Sulawesi yesterday. This species was described in 1997 and has a story behind the description and discovery almost as crazy as the one from the original Western species in 1938. www.facebook.com/share/r/1VNQ...

Indigenous Australian astronomy is fascinating. It was used for long-distance navigation and trade. As well as stars and constellations, it includes dark clouds in the Milky Way; three are the delightful Warlpiri creators "Froglady Earthmother and her two husbands, Rainbow and Sky Boss".

Colossal’s new USFWS-backed deal to biobank ESA-protected species made headlines. While this may sound like positive action, it’s alarming for the critically endangered red wolf. Here’s why the partnership raises serious concerns for the species’ future🧵: www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/c...

The wonderful @marisakabas.bsky.social let me go long on the grim historic parallels between the Prairieland defendants and 19th century America’s brutal repression—and execution—of anarchists, union organizers, and political dissidents. We are all antifa now. www.thehandbasket.co/p/haymarket-...

Panthalassa

This fossil is of a lobed-finned fish named Osteolepsis macrolepidotus and was found in Scotland. The Devonian Period (named after fossils first found in Devon, England), is known as "The age of fishes" and was fish transformed into three major groups: lobe-finned, ray-finned, and sharks.

Science writing is shrinking, risking becoming niche and insider when we need to find new ways to reach the public. This week's free newsletter, out now. Sign up and read on Buttondown! buttondown.com/restingdinof...

For #FossilFriday: the Charlotte Whale, a fossil beluga found in the Champlain Valley in Vermont and now in the Perkins Geology Museum at UVM

Claiming IP over any reference to a major historical event is so goddamn absurd.

Forgot about the restaurant and was about to email the Mayor of New York to maybe get some songs from Power Windows added to the MSG tour dates

Oo mammal snacks. “They describe a relatively well-preserved collection of 77 diaspore morphotypes from a Late Cretaceous fossil forest in New Mexico featuring fleshy fruits with an average weight approximately the size of a blueberry.”

helpful coverage from @elpais.com english.elpais.com/usa/2025-08-...

The local library is getting rid of a portion of their old state geological survey collection, so I managed to snag some of it. This 40-page bulletin from 1990 appears to be an early version of what would become the classic book When Dinosaurs Roamed New Jersey...

"We should call this action what it is – blatant union-busting...we also have reason to believe that the sale was motivated by fear within Springer Nature that our attempts to doggedly report on the crisis facing science in America today would lead to repercussions from the Trump administration."

two millennia ago Socrates postulated what is now regarded as an ancient truth of philosophy - the only thing we can know is that we know nothing. and today the SEPTA trolley tunnel late night schedule reminds us of that truth each and every day