When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance

If you’ve been wanting a paperback copy of When the Earth Was Green to throw in your pack, take on a hike, get some sand or leaves between, it’s coming out May 5th! 🌱

40 years on from the disaster, why there are foxes, bears and bison again around Chernobyl Endangered species are making their home in a massive wild zone around the derelict Chernobyl nuclear plant.

"The zone has undoubtedly been shaped by radiation but also, crucially, by abandonment and time. As a consequence, the usual ecological rules no longer apply and this has meant Chernobyl now has some remarkable wildlife." theconversation.com/40-years-on-...

In my 'Environmental Geology' class today, we meet for the next-to-last time before Thursday's last exam. Main theme? 'Geological Implications of Climate Change,' with effects --> increased temperatures, permafrost thawing, sea-level rise, storms, mass movements, & groundwater, to name a few. 🧪🪨⚒️🌊

In memoriam: Hans-Dieter Sues (1956–2026) Published in Historical Biology: An International Journal of Paleobiology (Ahead of Print, 2026)

My obituary of the highly accomplished and brilliant Professor Hans-Dieter Sues (1956-2026) is now online, let me know if you want a pdf... www.tandfonline.com/eprint/NICGG...

Image of a cross section of a different plant species from same site (~409 million years old) taken by Hans Kerp. You can see the packed parenchyma cells and also the presumably mutualistic mycorrhizal fungi (blue ring) that were partners of land plants from the beginning…glass-like preservation.

Buffalo Calling Stones, Stinging, and Medicine Bundles: Fossil Legends of the Native Americans of the Plains The war between the Thunder Birds and the Water Monsters involved ranged warfare; they fired missiles at one another which the Sioux called kangi tame, or the blackened remains of lightning bolts.

How did Plains Indians explain and use fossils of long-extinct animals? Delighted to be cited in this fine article
www.distinctlymontana.com/buffalo-call...

Quartz variety chalcedony Tampa Bay, Hillsborough County, Florida, USA On loan from the Yampol Family and The Mineral Trust The Yale Peabody Museam

Quartz variety chalcedony The Yale Peabody Museam

I can’t get over how this quartz looked like a theater with a rapt audience. You never knows what’s happening inside rocks, lol.

Forensic geology gone wrong...
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By XKCD

10 books that will make you see dinosaurs differently Steve Brusatte, author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and The Story of Birds, recommends 10 dinosaur books to dig into

People other than me have written dinosaur books (hard to believe, I know).

And @sciam.bsky.social asked me to make a list of some of my favorites!

www.scientificamerican.com/article/10-d...

Moroccan dinosaur's fearsome tail spikes evolved much earlier than we thought—new discovery In the heart of the Middle Atlas Mountains in central Morocco, a global team of paleontologists and geologists has discovered new remains of a very unusual dinosaur. It belonged to the group called an...

#Paleontology

This goes extra intensely for academic writing, in my opinion. If you're using gAI to think (because that is what writing is) why should anyone read it? And sending AI generated writing off for peer review is just...

Newest #watercolor is Gonshuilong! Colors loosely inspired by the Sailfin Dragon (lizard) which I used to work with when I was a zookeeper. #paleoart 🦕🎨

#MolluscMonday Rare example of an Ordovician orthocone nautiloid with a fractured shell. Photographed in the stone floor of the King’s Gallery at Hampton Court Palace last week.

Lower Antelope Canyon, Page, Arizona. Shot on an Iphone 5s June 2015 #antelopecanyon #page #arizona #slotcanyon #landscape #photography #iphonephotography #cvvhrn

Let it be terrible. My first drafts are HIDEOUS. What's important is that it gets written, because you can always go back and clean it up, get feedback, improve things, but it needs to exist first.

Last full week of teaching for me, with classes ending next Monday & academic year coming to an end soon after. In the meantime, hoping to finish & resubmit a previously reviewed research article later today. What's the article about? Why, trace fossils, of course. #AcademicLife 🧪🎓🏫🐾

Result from the Pisco Formation, please leave all your angry comments below!
The Miocene of the Pisco basin is an absolute insane hot spot for marine life, over the course of millions of years the sediments recorded dozens of large mammals, especially whales...

Riverbank diorama scene behind a rail with fighting pachycephalosaurs and Triceratops skull

Close up of colorful pachycephalosaur models

Close up of background mural, featuring green and brown ornithomimid in the forest

Bearded fella sitting on ornithomimid’s back

Afaik DMNS is only museum rad enough to include Cretaceous Cannabis in their Hell Creek diorama.

(There’s also a little gnome riding an ornithomimid, presumably unrelated)

Star Trek The Original Series scene. We're in a CORRIDOR! A room door is open, and we see two crewmen spilling out into the hallway in red and blue uniforms. They are otherwise indecipherable tho because they are entirely enveloped in a big cloud of smoke. It's pouring out all around them and into the hallway area, like there's a Phish concert in there. Closed caption reads, "[COUGHING]"

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

Linocut portrait of Keeling in teal with geochemical sampling tools with the Keeling curve in copy and axes (vertical: CO2 fraction micro-mol/mol from 325 to 400 and horizontal: Year 1960 to 2000).

Happy birthday to #geochemist Charles David Keeling (1928 - 2005) 🧪🐡⚒️ #histsci whose decades long observations of CO2 in air samples from Mauna Loa Observatory were some of the 1st direct data to show the human contribution to greenhouse effect & global warming. The ‘Keeling Curve’ (in copper & red)

El 'taco

(psittacosaurus art commission :3)

Today in ~research that is cooler than mine~

Late Jurassic mammals, Art by Lukas Panzarin

Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, another Polish Mongolian dinosaur legend and pioneer, has prehistoric mammals named in her honour: Zofiabaatar and Kielanodon

Given we had Velociraptor Awareness Day. Did you know, many species of famous theropods were named after Polish women in palaeontology. Velociraptor osmolskae & Citipati osmolskae are named after Halszka Osmólska, a Mongolian dinosaur expert, responsible for describing Deinocheirus and Gallimimus.

Books books books books books books books books books books books books books books books

Scientists looked back in time to find the first signs of human-caused global warming. It’s far earlier than previously thought | CNN The human fingerprint on global warming was likely evident in Earth’s atmosphere far earlier than previously thought—even before the invention of modern cars, a new study says.

Humans were already changing the climate at the time of the US civil war

www.cnn.com/2025/06/16/c...

Max's Mobile Museum This is the 4th in our monthly series of posts celebrating Western Science Center's 20th anniversary. Western Science Center has an interesting challenge for a small museum. We are the only natural h...

"We are the only natural history museum in Riverside County, which is roughly the size of New Jersey and has more than 2.5 million people...we decided that offsite programming would become a significant part of our outreach efforts."

life-from-a-certain-point-of-view.ghost.io/maxs-mobile-...

Arsinoitherium skull with two giant horns

We’re looking for researchers in any discipline of natural history: if you have a paper coming out and you want to pitch @pbseons.bsky.social on a potential episode about it, send me a DM! #scicomm #paleosky #FossilFriday

(Arsinoitherium says please and thank you!)

Field photos of the tracks as excavated and during the jacketing process

Happy #FossilFriday from some of my favorite dinosaur tracks from the Hell Creek Fm. These ironstone oviraptor or tyrannosaur tracks were found by Mike Triebold in the early 1990s and named Wakinyantanka by Lockley and Hunt. 🧪🦖