🎥 We’re excited to share a new video on the PalAss YouTube channel!
You can now watch one of our webinars from last year created especially for Early Career Researchers.
🔬 Explore the session and catch up on the knowledge you may have missed:
🔗 www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLQW...
#youtubechannel
😮 beyond dream job
Our PhD opportunity is still open. A match-funded project with @chesterzoo.bsky.social, where the student will also be a Conservation Scholar. An exciting interdisciplinary project that can be tailored to the student. Even the pigeons are interested in our LiDAR scanner!
This grant has been amazing for improving our offerings and giving us the space to be more creative as we know we have the funds to produce the equiptment we need
It’s also let us to add in more modern tech-based elements to show off what palaeontologists do now & how interdisciplinary it can be 💕
ICAL are on home ground today!
We’re at Manchester Museum taking part in their HUGE British Science Week science festival for local schools.
This year, thanks to our @thepalass.bsky.social grant, we’ve added new interactive phylogenetic activity and an “surviving disasters” game to our roster!
Yesterday’s highlights:
A little girl’s face lighting-up when she found out I was a real palaeontologist because she wants to be one too
The kid in a football shirt asking relentlessly interesting questions about deep time and evolution
Handing specimens to adults who instantly find joy in it
Btw if you do outreach I can’t recommend a trolly enough. It’s great for Increasing our accessibility for volunteers by making moving things so much easier, meaning everyone can take part without having to worry about how they can transport anything.
Picture of a Trolly loaded with fossils and bones sat outside the entrance to a huge mall
Picture of one of our tables, full of mammal bones and dinosaur casts to talk about comparative anatomy. In the background is a a Caffè Nero
Our other table with fossils and a biomolecule activity on. We also have a cool new timeline and have been led a cute dinosaur friend
ICAL are ON TOUR!
We’re taking part in FunLabs at the Trafford Centre all weekend, chatting fossils, biomolecules and bones with anyone who comes by.
Big thanks to the @thepalass.bsky.social engagement grant for giving us the funds to improve our resources (and buy a trolly which is awesome!) 🙌
I commiserate.
I’ve never worked out what “goose book?” Means
We know that marine fishes 🐠 have an inverse gradient of speciation compared to that of spp richness, with higher speciation at higher latitudes. But, what about freshwater 🐟?
Find out in the new PhD paper by Juliana Herrera-Pérez and friends (not just colleagues) 🤿 👇
shorturl.at/zgKfA
Giant snake on an info panel about to eat a screaming child
The Museum of Scotland using small children in size comparison info panels is absolutely sending me.
Well damn, this is cool.
Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre-Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea | Chia et al., 2026 | Ecology Letters
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Published 📖
A general method for detection and segmentation of terrestrial arthropods in images🪲
flatbug offers ecologists and practitioners a ready-to-use, efficient and accurate tool for arthropod monitoring that addresses common limitations of existing methods 👇️
Getting our balcony checked today for what feels like the millionth time.
All prep for cladding work to finally begin soon.
Exciting to get it done but RIP balcony garden 😔
(We don’t have THE cladding but our building is covered in wood, which has spontaneously set on fire a few times….)
Call for 5-year NERC Independent Research Fellowships is now open. No limit on grant value and open to international applicants. If you're interested in being hosted by Earth Sciences at Oxford, our internal expression of interest deadline is 16th March. Further details: www.ukri.org/opportunity/...
Good article, but the framing is wrong. There is not a dearth of interest in taxonomy. There is a scarcity of funding and positions, which is a deliberate choice by funding agencies and institutions. The youth love taxonomy! It's the olds that are failing to meet their passion!
Evolution of behaviors documented by trace fossils. @ichnologist.bsky.social
It is COMPLETE NORMAL to have to re-fill a form because I used an old one that is EXACTLY the same except for colour formatting.
I understand completely why the other form was rejected.
Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller. First panel, Nancy talking to a logger sawing a tree and pointing to a carved piece of trunk. Nancy: Can I have that piece? My boy friend carved it. Logger: Sure. Second panel, Nancy is watching the log burn in the fire place. Nancy: I'm mad at him.
Every once in awhile I think about this Nancy comic and it makes me laugh every single time. Absolute perfection.
Current citation style:
MacFadden, B. J. et al. (2026). AI and paleontology: effects of vertebrate fossil sample size on machine learning image classification. Paleobiology, 1–17. doi: 10.1017/pab.2025.10084
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
🥳🥳
Taking a moment of silence for the fallen legacy of the fifa peace prize
Figure 2.1 the variety of organisms with very different habits and habitats which may accumulate as fossils in one layer of sediment on the sea floor. Drawn by Miss Mary E. Pugh.
I don’t know what I like better: the bloat-and-float kangaroo(?) or the expression on the whale as it is taken down by a giant squid #FossilFriday
From: Ager 1963 Principles of Paleoecology
HIRING: CMS Manager
You will provide systems management and user support for the Collections Management System (EMu) used by the Museum of Natural History and the History of Science Museum.
Learn more: https://oumnh.web.ox.ac.uk/cms-manager-0
what.
that's really cool!
Had an ultrasound done on my aching shoulder injury today
It is VERY cool to see how your shoulder bones and muscles move internally in real time. (in my case, jankily is the answer!)
📖 Published!
Individualised niches in a variable environment—Consequences for environmental change responses
This framework can be extended further to niche choice and evolution including all processes that can change the match between individuals and their environment 🌍 🌳
🔎
well that's a whole new rabbit hole to dive down!
