They're inflating a sperm whale in my town, which is a strong contender for the oddest sentence I've ever typed

Zachsia zenkewitschi is an extremely cool and strange shipworm that bores into the rhizome of seagrass. The females are ~1 cm long and do the burrowing. The males stay larval sized and the female keeps a "harem" of them tucked in a little pouch of her mantle. The anglerfish of bivalves! (275)

"Because taxa in classifications are still frequently used as clade proxies in macroevolutionary studies, it is necessary to obtain and compare the most robust hypotheses of relationship among named taxa in order to evaluate both character homology...& taxonomic fidelity to hypotheses of evolution"

We are delighted to announce that this year's Founders' Lecture will be delivered by Prof. @emmateeling.bsky.social, University College Dublin! TITLE: Bats: Genomes, phylogenies, fossils and cures? WHEN: Friday, October 24th at 6PM WHERE: Burlington House, London JOIN US: tinyurl.com/28u2u2z8

I am so sick of being told we have to accelerate science where accelerate is code for "ingest your work into the machine they use to argue that your job is unnecessary"

Meet our brilliant team of Associate Editors! Dr Paul Kenrick is a leading expert on the early evolution of plants 🌿 focussing on soil ecosystem development, plant organ and tissue evolution, and the co-evolution of plants and fungi. Read about his fascinating work: buff.ly/8gV5BKf #NHM #PaleoSky

The Royal Comb Venus: a gorgeous venerid with spines along its posterior. Its genus, Hysteroconcha, means womb shell, while the species is dione (mother of Aphrodite). Apparently Linnaeus was creepy in his description of the shell, and was called out about it (265) www.conchology.be?t=94&ID=894&...

Today's triumph ; finally hunting down a set of presser feet for my beloved 114yo sewing machine which has the older, rarer back-clamp attachment; this set has a narrow hemmer, adjustable hemmer, quilting foot AND a ruffler, they're a bit rusty but that's fixable 🙏

How about we try valuing writing more. Try saying “Wow this is a skill and it’s cool some people get good at it” instead of thinking barely-functional autocomplete is going to do anything worthwhile.

Finally getting back to writing up the new version of the Hangle suite of programs for fast Fourier Transform that I've been trying to finish for nearly a decade ... /o\ I'm slow but I always get there in the end

Library & Archives Open Day (free) 19 September 2025 When: 10.00 - 16.00 Where: Lasting Impressions Gallery (red zone) Our team have developed four themed displays: 🐋 Whales, science and conservation 🌱 Ordering and naming nature ✏️ Writing from the field ❄️ Polar expeditions #NaturalHistoryMuseum

We are nearly ready to announce this year's Founders' Lecture speaker! In the meantime time check out @maxjtelford.bsky.social's 2024 lecture: 'Are we really more closely related to starfish than to earthworms?' www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSR5...

For #TaxonomyTuesday check out these gorgeous sea slugs! Image from: A deceptive variety: integrative systematics and phylogeography suggest 𝘼𝙙𝙖𝙡𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙖 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙭𝙞𝙢𝙖 and 𝘼𝙙𝙖𝙡𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙖 𝙡𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙣𝙞 represent a single species (Gastropoda: Nudibranchia) by Ekimova et al. (2025). Read more: buff.ly/pAIkLxD #Slugs #NHM

If your work involves Big Palaeo Data, you should be *begging* people to publish little local studies of new observational data, jfc. Without that you have absolutely bupkiss. I say this as someone with a foot in both camps:

And it is SO soft. One of my hobbies is spinning and I so deeply wish I was able to try spinning sea silk

First snail has hopped onto the crinoid #paleoart #SciArt #platyceras

This #FossilFriday I have a sneaky surprise to share!! You might THINK this is a funky clam but ....

Megalodon was an overrated shark species and a massively underrated bivalve genus. Common in the Jurassic, they're named for their oversized shell hinge teeth. Thick shells and other morphology in common with modern giant clams have led to them being proposed as harboring photosynthetic algae! (244)

making up for not being allowed to pick up correspondence course Latin in high school by using English and French genus descriptions published alongside Latin ones in 1800s era literature to try and figure it out, like a very restricted-vocab Rosetta Stone

Freshwater mussels (Unionidae) are important to ensure water quality in rivers! Each mussel can clear up to 2-4 L per hour depending on species! These clearance rates can go up as flow levels increase. Unionids are champions at grabbing particles from moving water! (242) youtu.be/s_CaNfFtHhg?...

My best friend the disco clam!!!

Registration for this year's YSF is open!!! Abstract deadline: October 25th 2025 11:59PM GMT+1 Registration deadline: November 1st 2025 11:59PM GMT+0 Link: tinyurl.com/2w5n3e8

For #FossilFriday - Cardinia bivalves from the early Jurassic, found on Redcar beach and looking almost as fresh as if they only breathed their last yesterday.

Excited to share a new paper! "Sorting of ancestral polymorphism and its impact on morphological phylogenetics and macroevolution". Part of some work I've been doing on modelling the evolution of polymorphic traits in fossil echinoderms. academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

Clams are just cool af. It's a fact. (234)

Did you know we are one of two journals produced by the Natural History Museum London. We champion the importance of collections-based systematics and our papers cover fossil species from across the tree of life, substantially contributing to the systematics of extinct taxa. So, why publish with us?

"The earliest climate models made specific forecasts about global warming decades before those forecasts could be proved or disproved. And when the observations came in, the models were right." theconversation.com/5-forecasts-... #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #ClimatePredictions

New article out in @iaptglobal.bsky.social ´s TAXON: "A nomenclatural review of Acalypha (Euphorbiaceae) of mainland Africa". It's open access, follow the link!

📊 new paper! The natural phenomenon of upwelling, which normally occurs every year in the Gulf of Panama, failed for the first time on record in 2025... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... [most co-authors not on bluesky except @javsdiaz.bsky.social @jonscibulski.bsky.social]...

The production of pseudofeces is considered a major ecosystem service of bivalves. They are clearing the water column, producing sediment which decomposes and releases nutrients. Meanwhile the clearer water has greater supply of light to fuel phytoplankton growth from those nutrients! (227)

I'm hoping to take 1 MSc & 1 PhD student next year in the areas of Phylogenetic, Computational, and/or Evolutionary Paleobiology. Please reach out if you are interested in joining the @oupaleobiology.bsky.social, especially if interested in working on fossil echinoderms. Link for more info below. 🧪

wandering around the collection muttering 'buchiids, buchiids, where the f*** did i put the buchiids'* is the mood for the afternoon *turns out i put the buchiids exactly where they should have been, which for some reason was not where i was looking. i need more coffee

Keep your eyes peeled, this year's edition of the Young Systematists' Forum approaches! When: Nov 14 2025 Where: Online! We will open registration and abstract submission soon! Stay up to date here: systass.org/young-system...

When an organism lives inside another organism, it is called inquilinism. Modern giant clams have shrimp specially adapted to live in their gill cavity. @paleoadiel.bsky.social and colleagues described inquiline shrimp in the body cavity of giant Cretaceous inoceramid bivalves! (224)

Btw you should all go follow Dan bc a) he's awesome and b) he knows so much about clams and c) he is SO MUCH BETTER at posting regularly and coherently than I am, I cannot believe how long and informative this thread is

One like, one clam fact

Boring bivalves are the best and also I now have a colleague who makes the "I thought they were all boring" joke every single time he sees me 😂😭🙄

Dog is back with me post-hospital and doing okay so far!

surprisingly hard to concentrate on reviewing manuscripts when your dog is in hospital :/ (pretty sure she'll be ok but we're not sure what the issue is yet, waiting for a phonecall, hence doing work) (apropos of nothing i really highly recommend pet health insurance oh my god)

If you've ever struggled to take good photographs of fossils (or other reasonably stationary natural history objects), here's a beginner's guide to scientific fossil photography I wrote a while ago (and should probably update). coastalpaleo.blogspot.com/2016/02/pale...

⚒️ New paper out in Paleobiology with Aaron Goodman, W. Allmon, @crowleyk.bsky.social, A. Farnsworth, M. Hopkins, D. Lunt, and Cori Myers: Global climate model comparisons of niche evolution in turritelline gastropods across the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Love when you tell the dentist that flossing is what broke your tooth and she scoffs and produces floss and gives it a go herself and ANOTHER CUSP OF YOUR TOOTH COMES OFF maybe just believe me?? Please??

Context on this was: I found a paper from decades ago in which a Belgian Eocene crassatellid was transferred to the austral mostly-Neogene genus Spissatella ...

Meet our Editorial team! Welcoming our new co-Editor-in-Chief Dr Tom White - a renowned specialist in non-insect Invertebrates, focussing on the taxonomy and systematics of Mollusca; Quaternary palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic reconstructions 🐌🦪🐚🐙 Read more about his work:

Did you know.. Molluscs are the second most diverse phylum and possibly the most disparate! 🐚🦪🐌🐙🦑 A recent study by Karapunar et al. (2024) documents the phylogeny of Pleurotomariidae, the longest-living gastropod group, comparing different shell characters: buff.ly/2pEof6e @spissatella.bsky.social

Love to discover that the Lemkin Institute (which identifies nations taking steps towards genocide in an attempt to recognise and prevent it) has issued the UK with a Red Warning for Genocide because of recent law changes around transgender people. That's very fun and cool and nothing to worry about

Enigmonia bognorensis, from the early Eocene of Hampshire UK. 55mya or so, the southern UK (and northern France) were a hot tropical sea, and at the margins were mangroves - and mangrove jingle shells!

'circumcircle' is SUCH a good word to say out loud

Shameless plug: my ammonite and whale tail lino prints are now available on Etsy palaeofun.etsy.com

The jingle shells are members of the family Anomiidae. They're so named because their flat, thin but surprisingly strong shells sometimes are purposed as wind chimes! (210)