Fun fact: I just quit my job to go on a research trip to Kansas and look at mosasaurs! More to come soon…

There is a story behind every sign.

Whoever made the MOR’s Saurornitholetes mount was working on the Stegoceras back in the day as well. Can’t remember the guy’s name.

Yes.

Rostropycnodus gayeti

Day 3 drawing Extinct Aquatic Creatures as part of Ngabuburit activities during Ramadhan.

Did RCI make this mount? I saw it under construction in Livingston…

Work in progress Nothosaurus skull sculpture seen in left lateral view.

Nothosaurus skull almost done I think.

#sciart #paleoart

Four photos of the deep sea acorn worm Tergivelum cinnabarinum leaving a distinct, spiral-shaped feeding trail on the sediment. Photo from: Jones, D. O., Alt, C. H., Priede, I. G., Reid, W. D., Wigham, B. D., Billett, D. S., Gebruk, A. V., Rogacheva, A. & Gooday, A. J. (2013). Deep-sea surface-dwelling enteropneusts from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge: their ecology, distribution and mode of life. Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography, 98, 374-387.

Tergivelum cinnabarium is species of deep sea acorn worm which is noted for being a big fan of Junjo Ito's Uzumaki
#Invertebrate 🧪
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Flattened fossils in a pale sandstone showing a long, catshark-shaped shark from the Jurassic. Below are grey silhouettes of these body shapes and a palaeoart reconstruction of the shark in life

Check out our new #OpenAccess paper in @commsbio.nature.com redescribing bewhiskered Jurassic shark Bavariscyllium, led by Sebastian Stumpf. Although relationships hard to pin down, its catshark-esque form shows sharks explored varied body shapes from the start. 🦈〰️

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

UMMP is hiring: Administrative Assistant Senior position with primary duties related to administrative support, collections and publications compliance, and museum outreach and communications work. careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Uintatherium WIP

Long museum case with complete phytosaur skeleton centered, larger phytosaur skull to the left, and some sort of slab to the right. Chalk drawings above.

Long musuem case with Lycaenops and dicynodont skeletons, assorted therapsid skulls on the wall

Square museum case with Allosaurus, Camarasaurus, and other skulls. Header says Jurassic Dinosaurs: The Morrison Fauna.

Museum case with partial Diplodocus skeleton. It's a pelvis with some dorsal and caudal verts on either side and one attached femur. A skull on a stand beneath.

Some display cases in the old brontosaur hall at AMNH (1956–1990)

Two white rhinos standing in front of a hut in ankle deep snow. The foreground features a juvenile while an adult stands slightly behind it.

A large white rhino standing in a snowy field, one leg raised slightly.

A white rhino plowing through the snow, its snout and horn are covered in snow, the head in general is wet and darker than the rest of the body.

Since it came up in a conversation I ended up googling if the rhinos in the Salzburg Zoo get out in Winter and not only do they, it also makes for some impressive photos
Images by Manuel Bukovics

face of a sea spider, a marine arthropod. its body is very small and it is mostly legs. it has a long proboscis and two tiny brown eyes facing the viewer

look at this kind and friendly face and big silly nose

Platecarpus is a mosasaur, an extinct marine reptile with four flippers. This one is covered with colorful squares like a quilt, beginning dark teal at its back and fading towards light blue and yellow on the underside. Two Hoploscaphites, ammonite cephalopods, are swimming nearby.

Platecarpus & Hoploscaphites

Out now: latest addition to the Grande volume! Guang-Hui Xu reevaluates Guizhoubrachysomus from the Middle Triassic of southern China. Interpreted as a "luganoiid" in the past, this work argues Guizhoubrachysomus is instead an early dapediid, a group most famous from Jurassic deposits of Europe.

The skull of an extinct bird with a long, curved bill. Close-ups show features relevant to interpreting its sensory biology.

Sensory biology and evidence for nocturnality in the extinct Hawaiian ibis Apteribis: academic.oup.com/icb/advance-... 🪶🧪 (📷 @evolsara.bsky.social et al.)

A carnival-like exhibit entrance with a dinosaur skull, coelacanth model, and pantodont skeleton in cases under freak show-style banners labeling them as "Mesozoic terror" and "the fish that wouldn't die'

I was asked yesterday to post a walkthrough of Life Over Time, the shortest-lived and generally weirdest iteration of the Field Museum’s fossil halls. If you visited between 1994 and 2004, this is the version you saw. I’ve got some time, so let’s do this.

Growth dynamics, skeletochronology, and histovariability of the theropod dinosaur Berthasaura leopoldinae Osteohistological sampling on different bones of theropod dinosaur documents discrepant age record, growth, and metabolism. This could result unprecise paleobiological inferences if samplings are bas....

Growth dynamics, skeletochronology, and histovariability of the theropod dinosaur Berthasaura leopoldinae - Souza - The Anatomical Record - Wiley Online Library anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

That bottom part of the wing is where chicken nuggets come from

Adaptive radiation of pelagiarian fishes at the K/Pg boundary led to rapid diversification of mandible morphology Abstract. Mandibles represent a key evolutionary innovation that has enabled jawed vertebrates to adapt and diversify in response to a range of food source

New paper! Here we look at shape evolution of the mandible in Pelagiaria, a group of open-ocean fishes that includes tuna and mackerel. We find that shape disparity accumulated rapidly at the origin of the clade at around the K/Pg boundary... academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...

A snowflake eel CT scanned skeleton. it has scary extra jaws behind its skull that look like a bow with teeth.

Finally have time to upload things to Sketchfab.

Here's the dead eel I found at an aquarium store!

Thanks to the generosity of the store owner, everyone can see the scary extra jaws these guys have!

sketchfab.com/3d-models/sn...

Wow, look at how detrimental an effect world wars 1 and 2 had on the progress of taxonomy. Not the type of signal I thought I’d see.

Claim: The cost of living is low. True: The cost of living is much lower than what it will be in a few months.

Fact-Checking Trump On Affordability theonion.com/fact-checking-trump-on-a...

A digital painting depicting an ancient underwater predator called a mosasaur with a shark in its mouth. The ocean is blue, however red blood is coming out of the shark's mouth. A school of small fish are eating the blood while diving aquatic birds hunt after the fish. Rays of sunshine filter through the water screen right.

A large mosasaur finds a meal in a Komoksodon kwutchakuth. Named in honour of the K'ómoks people of BC and the word for shark, kwutchakuth, in the Comox language. The diving birds are Maaqwi cascadensis whose fossils were found on Hornby Island here in BC. Ma'aqwi means "water bird" in Coast Salish.

We can all relax now, ROM put out some press photos over the weekend!

Basically, the space between the Jurassic/hadrosaur hall and the T. rex/Cenozoic hall has been opened up, and now houses the real Zuul fossil plus the cast Gorgosaurus vs Zuul created for a temporary exhibit in 2019.

Top: Dolops striata (Bouvier, 1899), preserved young (INPA 2277) removed from freshwater stingray Potamotrygon leopoldi (ANSP 197001, 440 mm maximum disk width) collected in rio Xingu ca. 54 km southeast of Altamira, 3°33'10.7"S, 51°51'22.2"W, 10 Mar 2014. Bottom: Dolops discoidalis (Bouvier, 1899), live specimens (INPA 2274) attached to large redtail catfish, Phractocephalus hemiliopterus (ANSP 198243) collected in rio Xingu channel, 3°24'54.3"S, 51°42'42.1"W, 8 Nov 2014. Photos by M. Sabaj. https://bioone.org/journals/proceedings-of-the-academy-of-natural-sciences-of-philadelphia/volume-166/issue-1/053.166.0105/Annotated-checklist-of-parasitic-and-decapod-crustaceans-from-the-middle/10.1635/053.166.0105.short

An (ecto)parasitic #Crustmas. This is Dolops (above), which swims around and attaches to fishes (below), but unlike its relative Argulus, which has suckers, it has hooks to hold on. Also, is bizarrely cute!
🧪🦑

I love mammoth (painted this one having zoomies) 🦣

Photographs of two fossil skulls and an artist's reconstruction of the Permian pareiasaur Yinshanosaurus angustus from North China. The reconstruction focuses on the head of the animal with equisetaleans in the foreground and background. Image created by X.-C. Guo, © IVPP. Top left, holotype IVPP V33181 (Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences). Bottom left, paratype SXNHM V0010.12 (Shanxi Natural History Museum, Taiyuan). Scale bar at the bottom is 50 mm.

A new mid-sized pareiasaur from the upper Permian Naobaogou Formation of China & implications for the phylogenetic relationships of pareiasaurs onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

I have a new paper out in Environmental Biology of Fishes on the effects of parasites on the life history of White Sands Pupfish! The two main findings being:

🧵(1/3)

rdcu.be/eptDZ