A recent @newscientist cartoon p.s. I will be in Madrid and Germany very soon! Details at www.tomgauld.com

🧪 www.rmoutlook.com/environment-...

Some scientists are driven not only by discovering new knowledge, but by helping that knowledge travel further into the world. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/I65EqTr

For decades, coral reefs were considered an awkward fit for carbon storage. They didn’t behave like mangroves or seagrass meadows. Were they net carbon sinks or sources? But what if we were looking at reefs too narrowly? 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/rdYdMMX

Imagine surviving months of Arctic darkness… while dinosaurs walked around you. New fossils from Alaska are changing how scientists see the ancient Arctic, revealing tiny mammals that lived near the North Pole 73 million years ago. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/rV32YTf

What if graduate school wasn’t just preparation for academia, but a chance to intentionally explore multiple possible futures as a scientist? 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/rpm6EKY

Why did some bowhead whale populations recover from industrial whaling… while others never really did? The answer may have been hiding in Arctic sea ice all along. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/y05bkD6

France is mandating solar panels on every large commercial car park in the country — turning millions of square metres of idle asphalt into one of Europe's most productive clean energy assets. I have been mentioning this for months - they are shooting up on all the supermarket car parks.

Genau mein Humor

Happy #FossilFriday! Today we’ve got some South African gorgonopsians! Gorgonopsians were the apex predators of the Late Permian period, early relatives of mammals, and are among the earliest land animals to evolve saber teeth! 🧪⚒️🦊

🗺 The freshwater fishes of the British Isles London: Methuen, 1911. [Source]

What if we went through grad school dreaming about conservation expeditions museum collections environmental policy science storytelling renewable energy exploration restoration ecology, or helping shape how society understands science itself? 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/ueBXqsu

Imagine discovering a 500-million-year-old animal covered in spikes, with feathery arms that looked almost impossible to explain. For decades, paleontologists wondered what these bizarre creatures were actually doing in Cambrian oceans. 🧪 #SciComm

On NSF’s postdoc page, the biology and earth science fields have been completely eliminated; the only remaining fellowships are in math, astronomy, engineering, and “entrepreneurship.” Weird choice not to support research on the life support system for 8 billion people. www.nsf.gov/funding/post...

I spent years thinking the path was simple: PhD → postdoc → academia → fulfillment. But life is rarely that linear. So I started a new newsletter for natural scientists navigating careers, identity, and life in and beyond academia 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/fagQdMg

The day has finally come. The Story of Birds is published in the USA and Canada today!!

What do elephants have to do with tadpoles? A lot more than you’d think. A new study found that when large mammals disappeared from an African savanna, the chemistry inside tadpoles changed, too. The reason reveals how deeply connected ecosystems really are. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/rH6SW7r

A fast-spreading alga is covering parts of Hawaii’s reefs. One animal is tearing through it. But that might not be good news… 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/nG9DVy3

Happy Earth Day 🌍 We plant millions of trees every year… so why don’t forests come back? A small community in Kenya is doing something different... and it works! 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/Gf5KjBb

Plants have sperm. Some of it swims. Which means a patch of moss after rain isn’t just wet… it’s a place where cells are actively moving to reproduce. Most plants don’t do this anymore. So why do mosses and ferns still need water? 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/lMiZDw9

Why are axolotls so cute? Big head. Tiny limbs. That little smile. There’s a very strange evolutionary reason for that 👀 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/KxbSkYv

Axolotls didn’t evolve to be cute. They evolved to stay young (and alive). We just happen to love that. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/e9GK8gy

We have lions. We have wolves. So why don’t we have lion-sized dogs? The weird part is… we used to. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/06fvqeX

We have lions, tigers, and leopards. We also have wolves. So why don’t we have “lion-sized dogs”? 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/csX4PNI

Penguins and polar bears live on ice that looks almost identical. So why have they never met? The answer isn’t temperature. It’s a story of evolution, ocean currents, and a world that isn’t as connected as it seems. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/WByZigZ

Penguins live on ice. Polar bears live on ice. So why have they never met? It’s not temperature. It’s history. A story shaped by evolution, ocean currents, and a boundary most people never think about. Why don’t penguins live in the Arctic? 🐧 🧪 #Scicomm buff.ly/Xavy4Qh

If whales breathe air as we do, why do they struggle when stranded? The answer goes back 50 million years, when their ancestors walked on land and explains how evolution reshaped their bodies for life in water. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/onkO06f

I get to note you learn why whales beach themselves in my novel Napier's Bones, getting a fancy new rerelease this autumn from the good people at @newestpress.bsky.social. And I swear every word is true (except for the bits I make up).

Embarrassment. They die of embarrassment. Did I just swim onto land? What the fuck? Oh god. Don't tell the other whales. Just leave me.

Whales breathe air. So why can’t they survive on land when they strand? The answer has less to do with breathing and more to do with 50 million years of evolution. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/Q1wMQJr

What happens to seabirds when the ocean changes… just a little? Let’s go to a remote island in the Southern Ocean: Kerguelen Island in the sub-Antarctic Southern Ocean Every year, thousands of seabirds return here to breed. But timing is everything. 🧵🧪

For decades, whale conservation has been one of the ocean’s rare success stories. But the ocean whales are returning to is not the same one they left. A new study asks an important question: could climate change slow their recovery? 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/qB6Rx89

What would happen to marine life if the planet cooled, glaciers grew, and sea levels fell? The fossil record has been running that experiment for nearly 500 million years… and the answer is surprising. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/LcaUJeh

Climate is changing the planet. So ecosystems should be changing faster… right? A century of biodiversity data suggests something more complicated is happening. Here’s the question scientists are now asking: is nature keeping up? 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/iiccnel

Why did some species survive past climate crises while others vanished? A 500-million-year fossil study suggests the answer may be hidden in the shape of the continents. Sometimes survival wasn’t just about adaptation. It was about the map. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/KSS1D5Y

For years, we’ve measured coral cover and fish numbers. But what about the structure of reef food webs? Reefs aren’t just getting smaller. They are functioning differently. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/EXPzWtb

For decades, scientists argued about whether warming or cooling drives new species. The fossil record was holding the answer all along. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/jKZCdIN

The cover-up just never ends. Rest in peace, Ruben Ray Martinez.

#WeekendReading: Wang et al., on magnesium isotopes and how they work in carbonate minerals (notably the role of flow regime in setting the rate limits). 🧪⚒️ Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Extinction isn’t random. Range size matters. Temperature tolerance matters. Climate change matters. But there’s another piece we’ve long suspected: geography. For 500 million years, the shape of continents helped shape survival. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/rPvvUEM

It sure does!

Happy Birthday Darwin! 🧪

We know dinosaurs reached the Arctic. But did they stay year-round… or just migrate? The answer came from something tiny: newborn fossils. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/H62Y5Wh

Oops I accidentally spent three hours making a powerpoint presentation on phylogenetics and legless gecko diversity/appreciation. Look at how cute Aprasia inaurita is! 📷 Nick Volpe @nvolpe.bsky.social

Could dinosaurs raise their young at the poles? For decades, migration seemed like the answer. But tiny Arctic fossils tell a different story buff.ly/bLhO1l6 🧪 #SciComm

We know what killed the dinosaurs. We know where it hit. But here’s the question we almost never ask: When, within the year, did the asteroid strike? New evidence suggests it was spring. And in biology, timing can be everything. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/xoqrhxI

Development of lizards before the egg is laid. Very useful!