@daverodland
Necromancer for hire. 🧪⚒️🦪🌊☠️ Paleoecology, taphonomy, sed/strat, marine biology, mass extinction ... all things Earth history. Doomed to repeat it whether we learn from it or not. Living in the past and talking to dead things since the late Holocene.
Proterozoic stromatolites in Banded Iron Fm.
I've seen 'em with stromatolites (presumed photic zone), I've seen 'em reduced, magnetic and normally graded (presumably deep water turbidites). One of my colleagues slabbed one with bands of quartz infilled sigmoidal shear cracks (soft sed slope deformation). So, yeah.
Their pants are too short, too. Back in my day, the kids would mock them for expecting to wade thru flood waters.
Oh, that carbonate mud is something else! 😆
I remember learning the varve interpretation in undergrad, to discover later that it was in doubt. My baseline assumption is that BIFs were deposited in SO MANY different sedimentary environments, across a wide depth range ... I can't imagine they're all the same temporal resolution.
A large snail crawls on a man's face. Caption : "Dr. Brian Fisher, California Academy of Sciences" Comment from "thundercrumbs" : DOCTOR FISHER GET OFF THAT MANS FACE, YOU'RE A SCIENTIST NOW ACT LIKE ONE"
No, I haven't read it either.
I had to look it up out of curiosity when I discovered my former institution used to require every student spend a semester translating it, as part of their formal introduction to classical literature. Xenophon was apparently good for that!
One of the tragedies of losing the "classical" education is that nobody reads Anabasis anymore (especially not in the original Greek). It's really essential reading for anyone who wants to put boots on the ground in Persia.
TL;DR: never get involved in a land war in Asia.
It's an enhancement, not a replacement.
Linked down thread.
Those are the deep cuts!
Probably, but it's biology ... they'll always find a new way to surprise you.
Stegosaurus had the worst spring allergies.
On a more serious note: because the early Cretaceous extinction of stegosaurs coincides with the rapid diversification of angiosperms, people have speculated about that linkage for years. Proving it is a lot harder.
Still amazing every time I see it.
Museum specimen box holding two complete and one fragmented specimen of the uncoiled, chambered internal conch of Spirula (collected by R. Mitchell)
Hand holding a specimen of the uncoiled, chambered internal conch of Spirula at an angle, highlighting the perfectly hemispherical septa and the small opening for the siphuncle running along the inner margin.
Seeing that video of Spirula the first time was amazing ... nobody imagined it oriented that way in life. It has these beautiful little internal chambered conchs like a nautilus, but entirely within the bottom part of the mantle!
So, it's basically balancing upright on the floaty end.
Generally, I think 'creatively reworded acronyms & punctuation' are CRAP, but this one's a stinker to be proud of. Bravo!
Libraries are critical players in this!
Beyond providing many free public services (seriously, so many things beyond borrowing books), beyond introducing and recommending people to creators who they might never have discovered on their own ... libraries pay much more to secure circulation rights.
An unidentified bivalve mold in fine grained sandstone.
Celebrating #MolluskMonday with one of the old taphonomy lab specimens. They really broke the mold with this one! ⚒️🧪🦪
Moldic preservation involves diagenetic alteration of a fossil - in this case, a bivalve mollusk. Acidic groundwater dissolved the shell, but the exterior impressions survived.
I'm deeply fascinated by 'em, and got started with the Ordovician ostracoderms, but there's a lot more expertise here than I have on offer. @jackstack.bsky.social ? @friedmanlab.bsky.social ? Thoughts on freshwater sharks?
There are some facultatively freshwater sharks in the modern (bull sharks come to mind) ... but I am far from an expert in chondrichthyan phylogeny. So, best I can do is ... we still have some?
It is so frustrating, cooking well for one, and facing the prospect that there are at least two more meals left over.
You never had control.
You're putting too much pressure on yourself.
What control can a human possibly have?
You are but one being against the staggering unyielding Cycle of the universe.
To chase control is an exercise in futility.
Mmm, mixed clastic/carbonate shell beds ....
Trying to remember, but isn't there an argument for hederelloids being a different variety of colonial lophophorate?
Yes, that's why I specified richness. Morphological disparity and richness decouple from each other as diversity metrics in Cretaceous non-avian dinosaurs. It gets complicated!
Yeah, no. That's not why.
We know why.
Certainly more diverse (species richness) today. Given smaller average sizes, almost certainly larger populations - even before domestication.
The interesting question is: do they represent a greater amount of total biomass, either in absolute terms or as relative proportion?
Obviously, the gap before them was even longer.
We could easily spend the next century ignoring the contributions of men, just to redress the imbalance.
I still remember the jaw-dropping shock I felt when I learned at a Paleontological Society awards dinner that one of their major awards had not gone to a woman in roughly 30 years. There had been two, back to back in the '80s (Sue Kidwell and Mary Droser) and then ... men, men, men, men, men.
Great thread on a cool animal and a major problem: where do sturgeon come from? I still wish we could find a Triassic acipenseriform, there are a few candidates. But, the Triassic presents a daunting challenge to parsing out lineages that are gave rise to the fishes we have today.
Taylor's fun! They also got their mitts on Rebirth, if you want to fast forward through the first half hour and then put it on mute.
Deeply grateful for the server who made a point to ask about food allergies, and then followed up with the cooks, because hot damn, some cuisines just want to kill me.