... Is it though? Nearly everywhere we look we find non-hetero relations. Absence of anything queer would be the unexpected outcome!

🚨 THIS IS NOT A DRILL 🚨 We’ve just seen this, by creator “Menapian” - a 4,998-piece set of the Great Exhibition (1851) Crystal Palace - complete with a bonus Megalosaurus and Ichthyosaur… beta.ideas.lego.com/product-idea...

Are you... - From a racially marginalised background? - Interested in studies or careers in Earth, environmental, or ecological sciences? Book your FREE ticket to the Explorers Conference 2024! When: Thursday 28th November Where: NHM, London www.eventbrite.com/e/explorers-...

I LOVE THESE. Let me add this adorable orange tip that was digitized during the iCollections project. Here they are! And here's "A History of Shropshire" which features a snippet about this exact specimen. Famous!

I've updated this starter pack for all interested! Now bursting with over 100 natural history museum related accounts 🎉🌱🦆🙌 go.bsky.app/NtdUnyF

to be loved is to be changed

well, here it is lads after combing through some 1,400 records, it looks like the slender-billed curlew is indeed extinct and the last known photo taken in 1995 was probably at the point it slipped beneath the waves 🦉🧪 www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...

Y’ALL! Scientists at Schmidt Ocean just captured this rare video of an open-ocean squid caring for its young. That pearl-packed black bag between its tentacles is a brood pouch, each pearl is a developing baby squid (you can see a few hatch out at the end). Nature is so cool. 🧵 🪼🦑🐙🌿🧪

Posting this again because a lot of people said they found it helpful! Guide to ALT text: www.perkins.org/resource/how...

So many touching details in Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery, London. I can’t recommend enough to go and see Vincent’s butterflies and dandelions and trees and sky! 🌥️

shallow waters

in my hypothetical worm field guide im not sure if it would be funnier to have a color index like in bird field guides but “pink” and “brown” contains 95% of the species, or to have highly specific color names that have people squinting at a worm trying to decide if it is rose or peach blossom pink

A few more angles on LA’s fighting dinosaurs for all of us born too late to see them in their original glory. Now, who’s going to see Gnatalie, the museum’s new greeter dinosaur, when she debuts tomorrow? Share pics!

Okay, so I'm writing something for my staff intranet for Trans Awareness week and made up this image to go along with it, using images from our digitised collections. I discovered a strange little story in my hunt for pink lepidoptera...🧵 #digitalcollections #lepidoptera #naturalhistory

In honour of this insane Homotherium cub news, here’s a lovely H. latidens canine we have at NHM London, one of the first discovered in England and among those used by Richard Owen to describe the species in 1846. Happy #FossilFriday!

Saber-toothed toe beans. Saber-toothed toe beans

This is not a drill, a mummified sabretooth cat has been published from the #Pleistocene permafrost of Russia. It's a Homotherium cub! The team (Lopatin et al.) reckon it's Homotherium latidens. It's too young to have enlarged upper canines. Paper is OA ... www.nature.com/articles/s41... cont...

aurora dragon

This is amazing, and only recently archived: hand-drawn concept art and miniature dioramas (!) from the planning of the Los Angles Natural History Museum's 80s and 90s dinosaur galleries. Sketchup is great and all, but man I wish I was around for this era of exhibit design.

Cambrian explosion

The Cretaceous corner at the Peabody Museum, before and after the renovation that opened earlier this year. The Edmontosaurus relief mount and Zallinger mural remain, but the design is brighter and there is a “less is more” ethos to the new version. #FossilFriday

New paper alert! We extended the known range of coconut crabs by >600 km further east in Polynesia! 🦀🧪

look at this absolute unit

Hello new followers! Here's a specimen which combies mineralogy and biology! Petrified wood forms when mineral-rich water flows through the remains of a tree and gradually replaces its organic material with #minerals. This fossilisation process preserves the original texture of the wood! #fossils

There are a lot of new arrivals lately, so here is my naturalists starter pack if you're looking to add more nature to your timeline! And if you're a non-scientist naturalist, I'm happy to add you as well! There are no requirements, if you post about nature, you're in. go.bsky.app/5MZYVyN

We proudly present: The Art of #InverteFest – a digital art book showcasing the work of 66 artists from around the world, in celebration of overlooked invertebrate fauna. Thank you to the human artists of bluesky who contributed to our first art book! Download here drive.google.com/file/d/1WYvI...

ok ok I have tried to pull together a list of all the natural history museums and people who work at them! Unsurprisingly this is very NHM London biased, so if you work at or know of other natural history museums on here then let me know! 👇 go.bsky.app/NtdUnyF

Platydesmus is a wonderfully-shaped genus of fungus-feeding millipedesnl from the Neotropics. although I found these wandering solo, they can form dense aggregations where, I believe, the males provide care to their eggs and young.

I have a cancelled meeting and I was moving my photo stores last week so you all are gonna get an old-fashioned photo history of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's fossil halls (my happy place/obsession). This is from memory so dates may be off by a year or three. 🧪📜🦖🦕🦣🐡

This was hanging up in an office at work. For some reason I thought it was about how to defend yourself against swans (it's actually about male swans fighting each other) #nature

More preservation of defunct displays, please!

Have a jolly weekend, everyone!🎄 DYK, Rudolph is queer! Same-sex sexual behaviour is well documented for reindeer, male and female. Read about it in Bruce Bagemihl's Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (1999) from which this image by John Megahan is taken. #QueerInSTEM

This year's definitive nature highlight for me: spontaneous encounter with the world's bravest Blue Tit...and a Great Grey Owl. 🪶🦉🇫🇮 Merry Xmas & Happy New Year!

We begin on MONDAY. I'll be mostly offline except for #InverteFest stuff. Don't forget to join the iNaturalist project to participate in community science! www.inaturalist.org/projects/inv...

Seadevil

August 28 - September 3!! #InverteFest 🐜🪼🦀🕷️🐝🐛🪱🦞🦟🦑

hey look, I wrote a nice little piece on a 500-million-year-old murder mystery! 🧪 It was assumed that the shrimp-like Anomalocaris was chomping on trilobites, but we had the wrong suspect! https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2023/july/cambrian-apex-predator-probably-preferred-soft-bodied-prey.html

Monarchs and milkweeds 🦋🌸

sporb

Enjoy these bee feet (aka. beef) right here courtesy of @franzanth.bsky.social !!