Hiked up Sourdough Canyon south of Bozeman, in the Gallatin Range, to view this amazing garnet-bearing amphibolite. ⚒️

Type specimen of Diplocaulus salamandroides is from the earliest Kasimovian of Illinois, just ever so slightly younger than Mazon Creek and sharing many taxa with the Mazon Creek assemblage. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

For approximately 3 years I have been promising to rerecord the outdated lectures in my (exceedingly free) online Science of the Solar System course. I JUST FINISHED TODAY. Give me a week or so to get it all posted. Please clap, but, better, check it out [when I post]

The trail into the cinder cone of Red Mountain. A wonderland of rock formations 30 miles NW of Flagstaff #Arizona #Southwest

Incredibile SO2 plume of the latest #Etna eruption seen from #space. The #Copernicus #Sentinel5p image on July 7th shows the long travel of SO2 crossing the #Mediterranean and reaching Northern #Africa. #volcano #Sicily

“I’ve been joking that these fish were just out there making poor life choices." Many thanks to @uglyfossils.bsky.social for talking to me about some unusual fossil bite marks! My latest Buttondown article, out now for paid subscribers! buttondown.com/restingdinof...

🧵 10/11 This study reshapes how we think about the evolution of complex traits in vertebrates. It's not one big bang...it's a long, slow, independent assembly. 🔬✨ 📄 Published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

🧵1/11 New paper alert! One of 2 out today from #NearLab. Tunas are basically the superheroes of the ocean — warm-blooded, massive, and blazing fast. But HOW did they get that way? A new study just cracked open 50+ million years of evolutionary history. Let's dive in. 🐟⬇️

I've only skimmed this so far, but there are already definitely parallels with the Grindavík/Sundhnúksgígar sequence.

The first-known direct observations of a seafloor spreading event at a mid-ocean ridge in the Indian Ocean are presented in Nature. The observations offer insight into how new oceanic crust is created: spklr.io/63323EOhJP #Geoscience #Geology #EarthSciences ⚒️

(1/2) Resembling the tiny parts of an impossibly intricate and eye-catching timepiece, strewn from a watchmakers toolkit, these are in fact fossil Crinoids, Corals, Bryozoans and Brachiopods.

It's official...GLODAPv3 is out! glodap.info 🌊

Ancient Roman May Have Been the World’s First Collector of Sea Monster Fossils gizmodo.com/ancient-roma...

How thick is the crust beneath the western Indian Ocean? Earthquake echoes reveal the answer. 🔗 Read now: seismica.library.mcgill.ca/article/view...

Wiggly little fossils found in Illinois reveal that our early, amphibious ancestors didn't metamorphose like frogs do today. Last week's newsletter article, now free on my blog! To support writing like this and see it first, subscribe to my newsletter on Buttondown. buttondown.com/restingdinof...

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

Years ago I was able to visit a museum with this fantastic model of the Cambrian worm Ottoia! Interpreted to have been an early priapulid worm ("archaeopriapulid") ! They had a lovely model of it! #wormwednesday

New paper out, co-led with Federico Fanti, in Global and Planetary Change! 🌩️🦖 We show how monsoons & tropical cyclones built the ~80 Ma Villaggio del Pescatore Lagerstätte in NE Italy, the Tethyshadros–Acynodon site. Image: “Stormbringer” by Davide Bonadonna. doi.org/10.1016/j.gl...

The Curiosity rover has found stones composed of near-pure sulphur in an ancient river canyon on #Mars, report VanBommel et al. There's no sign of nearby volcanism, so they propose formation was by decompression of sulphur-rich clathrates. ☄️🔭 #planetsci www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We’re pleased to share bipartisan legislation from U.S. Senators John Hickenlooper and Lisa Murkowski to reauthorize Earth MRI. GSA Executive Director and CEO (Interim), Bridgette Moore, was featured in the Senators’ press release. Read more: geosociety.co/bipartisan-bill

Quite some nightmare-inducing pics @ifremer.bsky.social published after a recent Nautile deep sea expedition. Between 1950-1990, >200000 barrels of radioactive waste were dumped in the NE Atlantic. Onsite measurements reveal the presence of radionuclides, at levels higher than expected in this area.

We will have a 23 month research associate role opening to support our work on mammal fossils from the Isle of Skye. Open to candidates with substantial CT-segmentation experience with Masters or PhD qualifications. Advert should be out next week - will post soon but do get in touch if of interest.

Nilpanapan, A., Manitkoon, S., Suteethorn, V. et al. A new mamenchisaurid sauropod from the Lower Phu Kradung Formation, Upper Jurassic of northeastern Thailand. Sci Rep 16, 21205 (2026). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Your research belongs at the center of the geoscience conversation. This October, join us at GSA Connects 2026 in Denver, Colorado, USA, for 4 days of geoscience. Deadlines: • Abstract Submission: 6 August • Early Registration: 27 August Submit your abstract or register: connects.geosociety.org

Keeping on a scombriform theme and rounding out the trio, Wang et al. present a new molecular phylogenetic analysis of trichiuroids (snake mackerels and kin). onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Next, @chasedbrownstein.bsky.social, @tjnear.bsky.social, et al. use an expanded UCE dataset for scombrids to investigate the timing of the origins of endothermy in the group. They argue for the protracted assembly of key aspects of scombrid biology. royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

On the road, but a quick spin through a trio of recent papers with implications for acanthomorph evolution. First off, Allison Murray and colleagues describe two new spiny-rayed fishes from the freshwater late Cretaceous "Pisces Point" site in Alberta: cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/...

Google Earth Pro will be no longer avaliable for download from June 2027 onwards. It's one of the tools that made my early work possible, so it's really sad to see it go. support.google.com/earth/thread...

A devastating loss to so many geoscience educators

It also makes me happy that libraries and book clubs keep picking up When the Earth Was Green. In fact, if you’re around Baltimore, I’ll join one at Snug Books later this month!

⚒️🧪 Travel back 635 million years with Dr Caleb Bishop, #GeoscienceAustralia geoscientist. Discover evidence of life surviving beneath ❄️🌏 Snowball Earth's ice sheets in WA’s Officer Basin and how it’s reshaping our understanding of algae and the rise of animals. 11am, 22 July. ga.gov.au/publictalks

This is really interesting. The common cause (of evolution, taphonomy) does deep: "Monsoon-driven storms created a Cretaceous dinosaur Lagerstätte. Microbial mats enabled rapid sealing and exceptional soft-tissue preservation." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio

Taphonomic analysis at Liang Bua reveals the behavioral and technological capabilities of Homo floresiensis | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

While I'm checking in on BlueSky, here's the stem-mammal Sphenacodon ferox, which lived long before there were any dinosaurs.

Holes xkcd.com/3266/

Just out - a new piece by me on the next Yellowstone super-eruption www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth...

Because we can never have too much T. rex content (sigh), in this week's Fossil Files episode, @fossilrob.bsky.social and I talk about that recent Why-T-rex-had-short-arms paper that hit the headlines a couple of weeks ago. Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts: share.google/4p149gj6xTcB...

Katrina and Emily present our latest adoption to the vert palaeo teaching collections, a platypus. We’re all now very invested in finding him a name - any suggestions?

⚒️ Why are there earthquakes at passive continental margins? ⚒️ Find out in our #RiftAndRiftedMarginsSeminar July 6th 2026, 4 pm CEST with Hamza Skikra @baoningwu.bsky.social Hardy Nkodia M.D-V. Register uni-potsdam.zoom-x.de/meeting/regi... Past talks www.youtube.com/@riftandrift...

Klimawandel lässt Meerestiere schrumpfen: www.fau.de/2026/06/news...

Would be interesting to know if these dykes are igneous or sedimentary. If they are sedimentary, they might have been driven by overpressure during burial, which might have been due to hydrocarbon generation.

HiRISE 3D: A Possible Eroded Dyke System in Atlantis Chaos These dykes would be intruding into sediments of probable lacustrine origin, deposited in this basin of the southern cratered highlands. Full image: https://www.uahirise.org/anaglyph/ESP_092224_1450_ESP_092593_1450_RED #Mars #NASA

Fascinating new findings of early strains of Black Plague suggest outbreaks happened much earlier than previously thought, were highly lethal, and may have been spread directly from human-to-human rather than fleas. https://nyti.ms/4arTyfm #paleosky

⚒️ Article: Satellite observations suggest an approximate 20% increase in global riverine particulate organic carbon export to the ocean over the past four decades, driven primarily by tropical deforestation and Arctic permafrost thaw @geolidf.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Redescrição da osteologia e sistemática de Panguraptor lufengensis (Neotheropoda, Coelophysoidea) sjp.pensoft.net/article/1854...

Nice piece on our little Antarctic dino find courtesy of the BBC Science team: www.bbc.com/news/article...

Just published: Cambrian Carbon-Sequestration Geosystems of Canada #CarbonSequestration #CarbonCapture #CCS #CarbonStorage #Geology tinyurl.com/2upkeye5

These two statements are incoherent: "70° rotation for the last 60 million years and 18° for the last 15 million years." "The motion of the Pacific Plate is dragging the Sierra Nevada block NNW, and in turn this block is pushing the Oregon Block northward." Why? Check next post.

Are we having more earthquakes than usual?

"In many of these regions, the infrastructure is not resilient, and a large earthquake can be expected to kill thousands to tens of thousands of people. In the quiet period between earthquakes, it is easy to lose the political will to prepare." On going theme of conversations on here last ~2 weeks.