James Witts

Starmer's ability to find the exact sweetspot which pisses off everyone is extraordinary. He's a savant.

#FossilFriday A beautiful Cretaceous seastar. This fully articulated specimen of Calliderma was collected in the Chalk of England.

🚨New preprint out @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social (under review elsewhere!) 🧵

No global collapse of food webs across the Permian–Triassic Mass Extinction (PTME)

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Ah man, this is good fun.

This just made me laugh out loud on the tube.

A table covered in bags, boxes, and packages of tin foil containing rocks

A large rock containing fossils sitting on newspaperwith a geological hammer alongside.

A fossil ammonite broken in half and sitting on newspaper with a chisel.

Close-up of a rock containing fossil bivalve shells.

Perfectly Normal looking morning activities for a geologist working from home this morning.. 😅 Sampling 66 million year old sediment and concretions on the dining room table (all hammering done in the back garden.. ⛏️)

The AI-Augmented Scientist The promise and pitfalls of using AI tools to boost my capabilities as a scientist

As a rare climate scientist working in Silicon Valley, I've been drinking from the AI firehose a lot more than my peers. I thought it would be helpful to lay out my experiences of both the promise and pitfalls of using AI to accelerate scientific research:

The Piltdown forgery extended to other fossils supposedly from the site (but probably planted) that Dawson stained brown. My personal favourites being 'The Piltdown Clams'! Two specimens of Upper Cretaceous inoceramid bivalve derived from the #Chalk.

Stories in the UK media continue to run and run.

In any matter where a student feels something has gone wrong, there is a well established complaints process. And it works! With no need for no-win-no-fee lawyers!

No where is it reported whether they have tried this proper route to resolution.

Two 🇺🇲 colleagues visited the museum this week, both prof level and winding down into retirement in Earth Science/Oceanography. They emphasised VERY STRONGLY that what is currently happening with NSF and funding decisions is entirely abnormal*.

*actual language used was considerably stronger..

Colour photo. a stereotypical fibreglass raptor concreted on the top of a triangular prism-esque stone monument, depicting dinosaur fossils. the simple terra cotta design looks crude, but is a homage to old colonial street signs in Merida, a city to the south

Buenas tardes from the monument in the market square at Chicxulub!

The people who have to insure our homes and cars know that climate change is real, because it affects their bottom line. It's not that regulating emissions is bad for business; it's just bad for a small number of industries that happen to be very powerful.

Three people hiking across a brown rocky landscape with some snow on the ground.

Three people working on digging pits and taking rock samples from a small cliff in a brown-green rocky landscape.

Part of a curved ammonite shell belonging to the genus Diplomoceras.

#OTD exactly two years ago I was in the field on Seymour Island, Antarctica. 15/2/24 was a gruelling 12-hour field day, hiking to and sampling this scenic outcrop containing the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary & mass extinction. Feat. obligatory bits of paperclip-shaped ammonite.

"That's here. That's home. That's us."

February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 🛰 takes famous "Pale Blue Dot" photo, showing Earth the as seen 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun 🌍

science.nasa.gov/mission/voya...

Nadhim Zahawi thinks London is now unsafe, because the other day a tired-looking man walked past him during the morning rush hour.

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

“I’ve reviewed over 50 sticky toffee puddings” is an incredibly powerful way to begin a video

This doesn't change after your PhD unfortunately. Which might also explain a lot about Academia.

Halting predicted vertebrate declines requires tackling multiple drivers of biodiversity loss Global vertebrate populations decline faster in the presence of multiple threats compared to single threats.

🚨Paper alert🚨
Very happy to see our paper published in @science.org #ScienceAdv.

Very greatful to have worked with such a great team @duncanobrien.bsky.social #tomJohnson @robinfreeman.bsky.social #ValentinaMarconi #LouiseMcRae @expecocons.bsky.social

👇Check the main findings below!

Regular reminder: academia's funding and success rates are so low it is *purely* chance and generally will not reflect the quality of anything.

This applies everywhere.

YouTube video by Netflix The Dinosaurs | Official Trailer | Netflix

A trailer packed with prehistoric delights for #FossilFriday!
I did some consultancy reconstructing the #Mesozoic world (and how it ended ☄️☠️) for 'The Dinosaurs', very much looking forward to seeing the show on @netflix.com March 6th.

youtu.be/y4ZBSzYUTL0?si

again we do not really do a good job of explaining how wealthy people like Jeff Bezos are

his net worth is $253.2 billion.
so he could take one million dollars, and just light it on fire
and then do it again tomorrow
and again the day after that
and then do it every day for 693 years and 8 months

Portrait of Gideon Mantell as a young man with long sideburns, wearing a dark coat and white shirt. An ammonite and hammer rest on a table next to him.

3 February 1790, Lewes, Sussex: birth of surgeon, palaeontologist and fossil collector Gideon Mantell who described Iguanodon in 1825 and Hylaeosaurus in 1833, popularised geology through lectures and textbooks and wrote on the geology of southeast England.

Daily Telegraph: In today's NHS, it's easier to get an exorcism than an X-ray WILLIAM SITWELL.

In today’s edition of “The Daily Telegraph Has Lost Its Mind”, the Daily Telegraph has lost its mind. Again.

One of the most surprising things I've learned from my research is that "how hot it's gotten so far" doesn't tell us much about "how hot it's going to get eventually". Long-ago, really weird climates can tell us a lot more about where we're headed.

TLDR; it is too early to stop doing taxonomic & natural history work and exclusively do meta-analysis; our existing datasets are highly structured & biology is weird. we shouldn't assume we already know enough to extrapolate a species' needs for conservation- we still need taxonomy & autecology

The flounder effect: disparities in taxonomic and ecological study intensity across extant and fossil marine organisms hamper conservation - npj Biodiversity npj Biodiversity - The flounder effect: disparities in taxonomic and ecological study intensity across extant and fossil marine organisms hamper conservation

Excited to present the flounder effect - how our biases in sampling and worker effort impact our view of organisms.

A long term collaboration with @fossilsndcoffee.bsky.social, @bigfacecats.bsky.social, Jon Hendricks, and Curtis Congreve!

#FossilFriday ⚒️🧪

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Can confirm I’ve had the experience of saying I live in London and getting a concerned/worried response, almost certainly due to all the online nonsense out there. Don’t believe the lies!

To be fair, like a lot of Reform members he appears to spend a not inconsiderable amount of time on another planet.

So WeTransfer, which has been my go-to large file sharing service for over a decade, has decided they now own what you upload & can use it to train AI. Anyone know of any good alternatives?