From Arches National Park, a hole through one of the formations. #RockinTuesday #artadventcalendar #photography

This sounds like the perfect set up to start installing political lackeys as POs so you can fully dictate what science gets funded. If you were the head of a regime actively trying to undermine all scientific research this would absolutely be the first step…

Remains previously thought to belong to miniature armoured dinosaurs are actually baby ankylosaurs, offering scientists new insight into how these remarkable dinosaurs developed. www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new... #fossils #paleontology

Paper led by Phd-student Kemiso Tshwenyego and others on the Palaeoproterozoic palaeomagnetic field. Well done on his first paper. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New preprint out! Using ~75k environmental OTUs + 77 fossil calibrations, we reconstructed a Proterozoic timeline of eukaryote evolution. Our results show crown eukaryotes were already diversifying >1.6 Ga, long before the first undisputed fossils (~1.05 Ga). 🔗 DOI: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Today, turn your amp to 11

Volcanic activity may have worsened the spread of the Black Death in medieval Europe. A study in Communications Earth & Environment suggests that climatic cooling and famine prompted Italian city-states to import grain from the Black Sea, potentially carrying the plague bacterium. 🏺 ⚒️ 🧪

Day 13 of #MAPSAdvent2025 🪨 Former MSc Geosciences student Natalie Cheng & Prof @bridgetwade.bsky.social (@es-ucl.bsky.social) studied sediments under the microscope to reveal a layer of microspherules (pictured) from the #Chesapeake impact which hit eastern North America about 36 million years ago.

For #FossilFriday: a skeleton of an American mastodon on display, Natural History Museum, London, UK. This particular skeleton, originally discovered in Missouri, US in 1840, was later "augmented" with additional vertebrae and ribs & named "Missourium" to distinguish it from standard mastodons. 🧪

Well that was a swift rebuttal to the paper about supposed Campanian-Maastrichtian spinosaurs earlier. Took only 3 months. www.ameghiniana.org.ar/index.php/am...

Our friends at USGS landslide group have some preliminary results about landslides and rock/ice avalanche that occurred from the M7.0 Hubbard Glacier earthquake on Dec. 6. I remember some people asking about landslides caused by this earthquake. Here you go: www.usgs.gov/programs/lan.... 🪨⚒️🧪

I do love triassic marine life #sciart

The Mesozoic mammal Sinodelphys, discovered in China and photographed at the Carnegie Museum, for #FossilFriday. Originally described as a marsupial but now thought to be an early placenta mammal, in my considered opinion this is clearly a creachure. 🧪⚒️

New study found the largest lahar of the last millennium occurred at Mt Rainier (4.392 m, WA) at the end of the year 1507! 🏔️🌊⌚ Wonderful tree rings... 🥰🌲💍 pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/...

Back to bryozoans for this #FossilFriday with a sample of free-living (lunulite) cheilostomes from the Chalk of Rügen, Germany. Spot the crinoid interloper.

Mosasaurs, the giant marine reptiles that roamed the Earth more than 66 million years ago, didn’t just live in the sea. Our new research shows that they could thrive in freshwater too! Let’s dive into what we’ve discovered. #Paleontology #Mosasaurs

Another great hike - Cradle Mountain N Tasmania. Dove Lake ringed by Mesoproterozoic greenschist ~1000-1600 million years old. The skinny horizontal layers are Permian ~250-298 m yrs so an age gap up to 1300 m yrs. Jagged peaks are dolerite that intruded the Permian deposits about 175 m yrs ago ⚒️🧪

I usually post widefield colour "postcard" views of Mars, but today, just for a change, here's a rather more abstract view for you all... Perseverance's tracks meandering across the Martian landscape... Hope you like it! Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/S Atkinson

This #FossilFriday I am delighted to say that I have been awarded a @erc.europa.eu Consolidator Grant looking at selection in #Ediacaran animals. If interested in Ediacaran life, do come and chat at #palass2025 @thepalass.bsky.social

I’m a week late but it would be remiss of me not to mark the @nhm-london.bsky.social birthday of Sophie the Stegosaurus #FossilFriday 🎂🎂🎂

Just a beautiful fold!! I hope even non-geologists can appreciate the beauty of what pressure can do to a rock. #FoldFriday #GeoscienceBluesky ⚒️🧪

Can finally share this #watercolor #paleoart I did a few years back of the “King of the Riverside” I did for the new paper by @melanieduring.com which shows that in Hell Creek there were giant Prognathodon mosasaurs that were living in freshwater (not just visiting)

Fresh. Water. Mosasaur. In. The. Hell. Creek. Formation. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn8l...

Look at the variation in field size and agricultural land use intensity in this small area on the Dordogne in southern France in 1950. The narrow strips (narrowest are 5-10 m wide) are on the valley floor, floodplain or low terraces. Woods mixed with larger fields or pastures on the uplands. 1/2

HiPOD: A Layered Mesa near Mawrth Vallis This target comes from the public via HiWish: “Similar HiRISE images of mounds around Chryse Planitia have revealed stunning and complex stratigraphy, indicative of widespread, regional-scale processes.” https://uahirise.org/hipod/ESP_076553_2040 #Mars

Revisiting Foote & Sepkoski's (1999) paper on measures of paleontological completeness and * my god * the brachiopods in figure 1 😮

For #Crustmas, an artwork of mine made for a Darwin-themed art exhibit at Fernbank Museum in Atlanta GA in 2011. Titled 'Descent with Modification,' it shows the evolutionary relatedness of modern burrowing crustaceans using a branching burrow system as a cladogram. 🧪🎨🦀🦞🦐 #sciart

In general, the really big terrestrial animals that have done the best at surviving humans are the ones that evolved alongside humans. This isn't the fault of anyone around now; our ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago wouldn't have known about extinction. But it does mean we lost out.

🫏 How did donkeys and pumas help resurrect extinct food webs in Death Valley? Learn how #TarPits research reveals how mountain lions have adapted lost Ice Age predator-prey dynamics, while restoring desert wetlands through preying on wild donkeys: bit.ly/BurroingInto...

Huge Congratulations to Phd Student Jeena Yun for having two companion papers published in JGR Solid Earth agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/... and agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...! In the first paper she explores the role of heterogeneous friction and stress in controlling

Mount Meager is active and unstable, putting Pemberton residents at risk. Canada's first volcano monitoring station will provide continuous monitoring and help researchers like Earth Sciences prof @volcancanuck.bsky.social develop an early warning system www.piquenewsmagazine.com/local-news/c...

Listened to the storm as captured by @alaskanime.bsky.social, learned where it is, and then was reminded of the relatively nearby wonderful Knik River, which provided an opportunity to produce this:

Almost forgot my world soils day photo. Lots of surprising and beautiful things about this soil. Root River basin, southeastern Minnesota.

“The Daily Nebraskan found in the leaked spreadsheet that every program eliminated appeared to be profitable…every program that the chancellor proposed eliminating generated more money from tuition dollars than the department costs to run”

Reading about ridges once used to grow potatoes in western Ireland, the fields long-abandoned but the ridges still there. Thinking about ridged fields built by Indigenous people in Wisconsin and nearby states that are still there under forest today, often unnoticed.

Heartbreaking. The University of Nebraska will terminate its entire Earth science department. One of the country's most successful and respected geology & climate programs: gone. When ideologues & politicians are threatened by the very act of studying climate change, I wonder: who of us is next?

It's over. Despite the fact that the academic council recommended against it, despite the fact that the program brought in more tuition than it cost, and despite the fact that Nebraskans need & deserve this expertise, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences will be cut. www.dailynebraskan.com/news/adminis...

PELYCOSAURIA, from the video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytWx... dedicated to early Synapsids. Many more more kinds of Synapsids are included there. 🐉 Pelycosaurs are known for their back sails, very trendy in the early Permian 🐉 #pelycosauria #synapsids #permian #dimetrodon #paleoart

Happy #FossilFriday from this smiling fossil bundle of vascular tissues! It belongs to a cladoxylopsid, an extinct group related to today's spenopsids (horsetails) & ferns 🌿⛏️ This specimen comes from Southern France & dates from the early Carboniferous, about 350 million years ago. #paleobotany

Ornithocheirus simus. A new portrait of this early Cretaceous pterosaur. #SciArt

Loving this new view of Mars, which I processed using images sent back by Perseverance yesterday... Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/S Atkinson

More folded + cleaved Coombs Limestone in Rockport, Maine, USA for #FridayFold fun. ⚒️

Tidal and hydrological seismicity modulations reveal pore fluid diffusion during earthquake nucleation Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#WeekendReading: Salles et al. on how carbon burial shifts between shallow and deep water carbonates over the last ~250 million years and how those interact with the silicate weathering feedback. 🧪⚒️ Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I know the year is almost over, but maybe you have some time left before the holidays to squeeze in one more Hell Creek Formation paper? New paper on a discovery from the Hell Creek Formation of North Dakota from an international team of researchers drops next week. Watch this space...

The Bay took over the highway during this morning's #KingTides in Marin.

Quickish Nanotyrannus lethaeus anatomy study. Really cool to see two papers more or less back to back that very conclusively reestablish NanoT as a distinct taxon.

Better (Bighorn Mountains, work in progress).