This frisky pair of bongos, a critically endangered species of African antelope, is settling into the zoo's Africa area. Meet Banjo and Bentley!

Illustration of a stork (Ciconia alba) skeleton showing a full side view with detailed bones including skull, long neck vertebrae, ribcage, wing bones, pelvis, and long legs with articulated toes. Additional close-up views of the elongated skull and isolated wing bones are displayed on the left. The bones are dark against a beige background, emphasizing the bird's slender structure and characteristic long beak and legs. The image is a scientific anatomical plate from a late 19th-century German publication.

🦢 Abbildungen von Vogel-Skeletten, .
Berlin, [s.n.], 1879-1897..

[Source]

Sun bleached mastodon sculpture amongst some high grass

Freshened up mastodon out in the open, with a bucket that says “peanuts for Bimbo”

A couple years ago I happened upon this abandoned mastodon while wandering in the woods. I’m happy to discover that he’s since been relocated to brand new playground area, and that his name is Bimbo.

Illustration of a giraffe standing on a light background with a faintly painted tree and sky in the backdrop. The giraffe features a long neck, patterned with irregular brown spots on a tan body, and four slender legs with dark hooves. Its face shows two ossicones (horn-like structures), large ears, and expressive eyes. The vintage style and muted colors suggest a historical natural history print from the early 20th century. The image is labeled "Plate XXIII" and titled "Giraffe."

🦒 The handy natural history
Boston, R.G. Badger, The Gorham press, 1910.

[Source]

Historical illustration titled "The White River Badlands, Rapid City, S.D., 1920," depicts a group of large, flat-horned prehistoric mammals, identified as Brontotherium gigas, near a river. The central figure is a massive Brontotherium standing in shallow water, with several others grazing or drinking nearby in a sparse landscape. Vegetation is minimal, with low shrubs and a few trees in the background. The scene captures the prehistoric fauna of the Badlands region, emphasizing the river as a vital water source in the arid environment. This detailed depiction highlights the size and habitat of these extinct creatures along the ancient riverbank.

🐟 The White River Badlands
Rapid City, S.D., 1920.

[Source]

a painting of an underwater scene near the sandy floor that is covered with shells, crabs, urchins and sea grass while overhead swims fish, turtles, manatees and a seal, and a numbered key to the illustration positioned below it reflecting the list in the linked blog post

#SciArt Spotlight 🎨 Florida Pleistocene
This exhibit painting brings to life what the marine environments around Florida might have looked like during the Pleistocene.

🗝️ Check out the species in the art + key, and related fossils from our collections:
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/exhibits/blo...

Collections Manager-Vertebrate Paleontology Department: Gantz Family Collection Center Location: Chicago IL

Heads up that the Field Museum is hiring a vertebrate paleontology collections manager: www.fieldmuseum.org/landing/care...

This hidden gem Upstate NY museum with dino bones you can touch is on the brink of extinction Officials say the museum that houses a mastadon skeleton needs to raise $1 million by the end of 2025 to avoid foreclosure.

Pretty good article about the specifics of PRI's situation and what led to the immediate need they have from upstate NY based media.

www.newyorkupstate.com/news/2025/10...

A 164.7 cm #rhino horn from #Yakutia sheds light on woolly rhinoceros morphology, longevity, and sexual dimorphism zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #permafrost #palaeoecology @davehone.bsky.social @amcell.bsky.social @elissazcameron.bsky.social @conservresearch.bsky.social

Skeleton of a round, vaguely beaver-shaped rodent with two horns sticking straight up in front of its eyes.

Low angle painting of a grassland under a sky dotted with clouds. Two shovel-tusked elephants approach a pair of horned rodents, while a blue bird flies away.

Ceratogaulus (or Epigaulus) hatcheri, on display at the Smithsonian sometime after 1910. This is the holotype, collected by JB Hatcher in 1885.

While this little dude is sadly no longer on display, it does feature in one of the Julius Csotonyi's murals that are now in the same hall.

Illustration of a kudu, a large antelope with a reddish-brown coat and distinct white vertical stripes along its sides. It has long, twisted spiral horns and a white patch on its face. The kudu stands in a natural, earthy environment with dry grass and muted background colors. The artwork is signed by C. E. Swan and is from the 1909 book "The wild beasts of the world." Despite the swan-related keyword, the image depicts the kudu antelope as the main subject.

🦢 The wild beasts of the world /.
London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, [1909?].

[Source]

Illustration from 1920 showing detailed drawings of upper and lower jaws of the extinct Titanothere species. The upper jaw (A) displays large, complex molar teeth with distinctive ridges and cusps used for grinding. The lower jaw (B) is more slender with similarly patterned teeth but smaller and reduced in size compared to the upper jaw. Both jaws highlight the unique dental structures characteristic of Titanothere fossils found in the White River Badlands near Rapid City, S.D., emphasizing the form and size differences between upper and lower teeth. The image is from the South Dakota School of Mines, dated 1876.

🦷 The White River Badlands
Rapid City, S.D., 1920.

[Source]

a large pale green caterpillar with black blotches has large barbed spines protruding from its shoulders and running down its back in smaller sizes

Oct. 23 🍺🐛 Bugs, Bones and Brews

Spooky season at First Magnitude Brewing with our Daniels Lab researchers, vertebrate paleontology collection & the UF Thompson Earth Systems Institute team.

Hickory Horned Devil Hazy IPA 🍺 with jalapeno peppers

Event: www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/event/bugs-b...

Illustration showing a group of six hippopotamuses in a natural setting by a river. One large hippo stands prominently in the foreground with its mouth open, displaying large tusks and teeth. Behind it, other hippos rest partially submerged in water and on the riverbank surrounded by dense green foliage and ferns. The scene conveys the hippos' semi-aquatic habitat. The image includes the label "Hippopotamus" and the scientific name "Plate XXXVI Ungulata" on the right side, indicating it is from an 1880 natural history book. The artwork features rich earthy tones and detailed textures.

🦛 Johnson's household book of nature, .
New York, H.J.Johnson, [1880].

[Source]

We are saddened to hear of Dr. Jane Goodall's passing, and so honored to be among the organizations she worked closely with during her long and incredible career.

Mortgage Campaign Landing Page — Paleontological Research Institution

www.priweb.org/mortgage-cam...

I can't get over how delightful that Tiktaalik is

Chalk drawing of Tiktaalik

Chalk drawing of Eusthenopteron.

Shortly before my VP class every week someone draws these delightful critters on the chalkboard--usually just in time for me to discuss them in lecture. The students have started calling this unknown artist "EMS Banksy." Complete mystery!

AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.

Electricity now costs up to 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers.

www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

Great news!
JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month

www.jstor.org/action/showL...

close up on dozens of wet shells and varying sizes of shell fragments are mixed together

Carrie Tyler (@unlv.edu) and Michal Kowalewski (Florida Museum) constructed and analyzed a massive dataset of marine fossils to demonstrated for the first time that functional diversity can be accurately inferred from the marine fossil record.
Study: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

In the early 1980’s, we began preparing separate spread wings to help illustrate features of birds that had never been accurately drawn.

Today our collection of spread wings is the largest in the world, preserving more than 40,000 specimens.

Historical illustration from 1896 titled "Fallow Deer" showing two British fallow deer in a natural setting. The foreground features a male deer with large, broad, flat antlers and a reddish-brown coat covered in white spots. Next to him lies a spotted female deer resting on green foliage. In the background, smaller deer are visible amid sparse trees and grassy terrain. The detailed, colored drawing highlights the deer's distinctive markings and antler shape, typical of the species native to Britain.

🐼 A hand-book to the British mammalia
London, Edward Lloyd, 1896.

[Source]

Black and white historical illustration titled "Moose, or Elk," depicting two moose in a forest setting. A large bull moose with broad, detailed antlers stands alert beside a female moose lying on the ground among dense foliage and grasses. The background features trees and a wooded environment, capturing the natural habitat of the moose. The artwork is finely detailed, emphasizing the texture of the moose's fur and the intricate shapes of the antlers and surrounding vegetation. The illustration is framed within a square border on an aged paper page, dated circa 1885.

🦌 Animate creation
New York, S. Hess[c1885]

[Source]

Extreme armour in the world’s oldest ankylosaur Nature - The ankylosaurian dinosaur Spicomellus afer possessed a tail weapon and uniquely elaborate dermal armour.

If you don't have access to Nature, but would like to read our paper on the new specimen of #Spicomellus, you can read it online at this link with no subscription: rdcu.be/eCJK3

“Bizarre” armoured dinosaur Spicomellus afer rewrites ankylosaur evolution | Natural History Museum The world’s most unusual dinosaur is even stranger than first realised.

It suggests early ankylosaur armour could have been used to show off to mates, like a peacock's tail feathers.

Later ankylosaurs might have moved to more functional armour as more advanced predators evolved.

Discover what else this amazing ankylosaur reveals 👇 (4/4)
www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...

From a trip to L.A. a few years ago, the @tarpits.org Page Museum's animatronic saber-toothed cat and giant ground sloth locked in an eternally looping Ice Age death struggle never fails to spark joy

Jim Estes, biologist who revealed how sea otters shape entire ecosystems, died on May 20, aged 79 When Jim Estes first arrived in the Aleutian Islands in 1970, he expected a routine wildlife survey. What he found was the outline of a scientific revelation. In places where sea otters thrived, the…

Jim was an incredible ecologist. I own several of his books, and cite his research reguarly. www.butlernature.com/2025/08/20/j...

A screeenshot of a Microsoft Teams message that reads: "hey. Do we have any dolphin brains?"

Every now and then you catch yourself realising that #MuseumLife is not normal life.

A page from Nature's Memory, including a picture of SUE the T rex at the Field Museum. The text reads: After Dippy, the other contestant for the title of ‘world’s most famous dinosaur fossil’ is SUE the Tyrannosaurus rex. Named after Sue Hendrickson, who discovered the specimen in 1990 in South Dakota, with over 90 per cent of the skeleton present, SUE is the most complete fossil yet found of one of Earth’s biggest-ever land-living carnivores. Preparators at the Field Museum in Chicago were able to skilfully mount the real skeleton in such a dynamic, imposing way that it is as lifelike as a skeleton can be, augmented by dramatic light projections to help you understand what you are seeing and engage with it more deeply. It is one of the most effective natural history exhibits I’ve ever seen. However, the preparators determined that SUE’s real skull was too heavy to be attached to the end of its neck. As a solution, they attached a lighter replica of SUE’s skull onto the mounted skeleton, and displayed the real fossil skull in a case alongside. This has the added benefit of allowing easy access to the skull for the very many research scientists who want to study it.

Happy re-birthday to @suethetrex.bsky.social - the most complete #Trex specimen ever found - uneartherd 35 years ago today. In my book #NaturesMemory: Behind the Scenes at the World's Natural History #Museums, I describe SUE as one of the most effective natural history exhibits I’ve ever seen ⛏️🦖🏆