Mollusca-focused, 6-yr postdoc Postdoc in Invertebrate Evolution: jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Universi...

Holy shit I'm so relieved I could cry. A very happy new year to PRI!!! www.priweb.org/blog-post/pr...

SEIZED with the desire to alter a Guess Who game to have pictures of invertebrates instead of people. Gameplay would be unaltered

Got this book out on my mother's library card while I'm visiting. Halfway through. Have cried twice. Have recommended it to three people. Will be going to get my own copy ASAP once I get home!!!

Someone told my sister that Australasian magpies mate for life but the males routinely kill their partners when they want to "upgrade to a younger model" and i'm pretty sure this is bullshit and google scholar certainly isn't corroborating it, but if an ornithologist could weigh in I'd be grateful!

In a super sensible move for someone who's only visiting and will have to get everything into a suitcase, I uh, acquired a spinning wheel at long last yesterday /o\

"Amazing book, bloody amazing" - review from my mother just now. She's completely buried in it, we may never manage to extract her 😂

This, plus it goes double for "uncharismatic" critters bc mostly noone has even gone to look so there's nothing to digitise yet ... and if we piss all our money into LLMs we'll never be able to know where, say, Kellia suborbicularis really lives - we'll just have an uninformed computer's best guess

“Why are you asking a chatbot something you can so easily look up?” Why would I trust it for bigger analyses, where I know I can’t see all the variables and assumptions, when I’ve tried it for these smaller ones and watched it fail?

Back in NZ with my parents for Xmas ... feels weird, lots of familiar things mixed with unfamiliar things, jumbled together

#MolluscMonday is all about rudists! These unusual bivalve molluscs were very common in the Late #Cretaceous, especially in tropical settings around the Tethys Ocean. Individual or conjoined specimens occasionally appear in the UK Chalk but are often poorly dated.

We are excited for the #PalAss meeting in Portsmouth this weekend Some of the team will be there, including our EiC Dr Imran Rahman, so when you see our table, come and find out about the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.. See you there! @imranrahman.bsky.social #PalAss2025 #PaleoSky

If you see a doctor, a politician, a scientist, authority figure or your choice raising Concerns about gender-affirming care for kids, trans people in sports, who uses what bathroom they’re promoting a manufactured controversy invented by white christian nationalists, whether they know it or not

"An Epilogue" by John Masefield, a poem so short it fits in a post: "I have seen flowers come in stony places And good things done by men with ugly faces And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races So I trust, too"

Every so often I remember the B movie concept my writing group came up with years ago - "HAAST'S SEAGULL", tagline "it will fucking take your chips" - and start quietly cackling to myself again even though it was over a decade ago

Imagine your country being seen as a hope for a new life for thousands of people wanting to live and contribute in your towns and instead of being proud of it you go no nope nope this country should be a scary shitheap people should be scared to come here how dare they think we are good

Looking forward to outreach today that will almost certainly involve me getting overexcited and brandishing the world's largest snail over my head like it's the world cup of obsessive nerds

"Imagine if just a fraction of the spume and righteous fury over the new surcharge could be redirected to those who really need it." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Cosupervising x2 🇬🇧 PhD projects advertising now: 'The effects of climate cooling on evolution of Antarctic Eocene benthic communities' (BAS/Bristol) shorturl.at/MiWqJ 'Testing novel archives of seawater chemistry in biogenic carbonate' (Leeds): share.google/dbojTRZme92R... Deadlines early Jan '26

This #MolluscMonday here are some great ones from my recent fieldwork in Fiji with Victor Bonito, Reef Explorer Fiji: two octopus watch Victor take video to make 3d models, a clam and a nudibranch. We are mapping out different areas in the reef flats to see how soft corals change through time.

My coping mechanism is 114 years old and a literal mechanism which given the dumpster fire of everything digital right now is a balm to my soul

Visitors to the Museum will have the exciting opportunity to enter our beautiful Earth Sciences Library. A rare occasion to see treasures from the collection and learn about the Museum’s work as shown through the collections we care for. #NaturalHistoryMuseum #SpecialCollections #MuseumArchives

Speaking as a non drinker, "bottomless brunch" should mean one can show up and eat as much eggs Benedict as one likes, not all this nonsense with booze in the fruit juice

SystAssn members don't forget the AGM starts at 2PM, registration link same as above.

Our website is back!!! 🎉🎉🎉 Also, if you have yet to register for this Wednesday's Joy of Discovery lecture (online at 3PM GMT+0), do so here: tinyurl.com/bdu5xans Prof. Mike Benton, University of Bristol, will be giving a talk on the origin of feathers.

Leicester's Palaeontology program has a long track record including discovery that conodonts were vertebrates, graduates who are Fellows of the Royal Society, innovative researchers, and a growing body of undergraduate students. c.org/HJW7FVxPwv

The online Joy of Discovery event is back! 🎉 This year the event is going to be a smidge different, with a single speaker. But what a speaker! Prof. Mike Benton, University of Bristol, will be giving us a talk on the origin of feathers. Join us NOV 26 AT 3PM GMT+0 REGISTER: tinyurl.com/bdu5xans

On Sunday the 30th PRI's Museum of the Earth will celebrate Antarctica Day, including a talk by Dr. Alejandra Gandolfo,"When Antarctica Was Green: Fossil Plants Reveal Its Crucial Role in the Evolution of Southern Hemisphere Floras" come check it out #Ithaca #Antarctica tockify.com/paleontologi...

Geology and palaeobiology at the University of Leicester are under threat, with at least 14 staff expected to be made redundant. Support them, their postdocs, and their students by signing this petition: c.org/SK8Xm8dhqK

keep ai slop out of scientific journals

The Science Teachers Association of New York State (STANYS), who have had PRI as a long time educational partner (most recently last week for a program "Finding Climate Change Solutions From Across the Sciences") have made a statement of support for saving the Paleontological Research Institution ⚒️

Given recent news about definitions of certain words getting in the way of COP talks, do I recapitulate this outfit at the COP-related even at work tomorrow? 🤔

Starting to get more friends sending me pics of critters asking nervously if they're real :( fuck the lie-generating machine

The indignity of having someone reanalyse your dataset but miss the point of your paper entirely 🙄

It's the 15th of November and they've started installing the wooden Christmas market huts in the plaza below my building and the bloody carol singers are here. FIFTEENTH OF NOVEMBER 💀

Bargaining with myself like "fine if I can finish reviewing this paper today than I can reward myself by weaving later"

Since working at the museum I have started to call spiders and centipedes "IPM officers" so that they'll feel more included in the team 🥰

Reminder, registration for this year's Young Systematists' Forum (Friday, Nov 14th), closes tomorrow at 13:00 GMT+0. Register: tinyurl.com/5n8mu5z9

Michael Foote's Models of Morphological Diversification (1996) should be required reading for folks researching disparity. "Assessing changes in the size of morphological transitions requires reliable evolutionary trees, preferably trees reflecting ancestor-descendant pairs, not merely sister taxa"

I notice that despite all the other "international" versions of menu items that McD's are blaring ads for up and down the high street, they have not yet brought the Kiwiburger to English shores.

Best drawer annotation of the day: "samples of 06.10.1996, ex-blue cat poo tray". Truly geologists will store samples in anything that stays still long enough.

🚨New paper alert!🚨🤩 🧪⚒️Welcome the first filter-feeding pterosaur from Brazil: Bakiribu waridza, from the Araripe Basin!! 🥳 The new species is AWESOME and was discoverd inside a regurgitalite 😱🤍 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

As today is #MolluscMonday and the 173rd anniversary of the death of Sussex palaeontologist Gideon Mantell, here's the Cretaceous ammonite Mantelliceras mantelli described (as Ammonites mantelli) by James Sowerby in his Mineral Conchology in 1814 from a specimen from Lewes sent to him by Mantell.

It's museum audit week!! We do this twice a year and it means I get to decline meetings and put my OOO on and just CURATE and it's my favourite. This year my audit plan is to work on the "minor classes" ("minor" but mighty!! Just ask any polyplacophorologist 🥰)

Some snails from work: Cross-sectioned pleurotomarioid, cross-sectioned Campanile, truly behemoth cowry, and ( just casually) the type of Ecphora quadricostata (Say)

Brachiopod pride 🏳️‍🌈

the rock record giveth, and the rock record taketh away, but fossils remain the only source of direct physical evidence for ancient extinct species in the history of life

Once again I am taking my special traditional role in a malacological conference of being the person who asks bewildered students if they're aware that molluscs have a fossil record 😂

If you would like to attend the upcoming edition of the Young Systematists' Forum (Friday, Nov 14th), registration will remain open until Nov 12th, 13:00 GMT+0. Register: tinyurl.com/5n8mu5z9

Generating a molecular tree =/= doing systematics, and definitely =/= doing taxonomy