James Witts

A comic panel from Watchmen, showing a partially muscled skeleton (Dr Manhattan) screaming in pain in front of two horrified security guards. Text reads: “November 14th: a partially muscled skeleton stands by the perimeter fence and screams for thirty seconds before vanishing…”

Happy partially muscled skeleton screaming before vanishing day to all those who celebrate.

A fossil coelacanth (Macropoma) from the Chalk in a drawer in the NHM London collections.

Well preserved fossil fish from the Chalk in the NHM London collections.

#FossilFriday at #SVP2025 today! Emma Bernard will be talking about dating the amazing @nhm-london.bsky.social chalk fish collections at 09:30 in Hall 4. Then check out posters by Twitchett/Underwood and Kaia Spence on new #chalk sharks & coelacanth size in Poster Session III, Hall 3 (4:30 - 6:30).

YouTube video by JAGGL113 JESUS CHRIST IN RICHMOND PARK: ORIGINAL UPLOAD

Happy Fenton Day to all who celebrate. Jesus Christ, fourteen years.

youtu.be/3GRSbr0EYYU

This is unbelievable. Just a complete lack of belief in objectivity. And the BBC fucking caved to it

The cover of this year's 'Molluscan Forum' feat. a picture of a Mexican land snail.

Delegates at the Molluscan Forum listen to a speaker on-stage in the NHM Flett Lecture Theater.

Delegates at the Mollusca Forum, register, mingle, and look at posters in the Flett LT foyer at the NHM.

Yesterday we welcomed 70 delegates from 11 countries to @nhm-london.bsky.social for the annual @malacsoc.bsky.social 'Molluscan Forum'! Thanks to my co-organisers and all participants for making it such a friendly & scientifically excellent celebration of everyone's favourite phylum. 😉 🐙🐌🦑🐚

There now follows a Party Political Broadcast by the Count Binface Party.

This from @lewisgoodall.com

A great time was had at the 'Festival of Geology' today! Thanks @geolassoc.bsky.social and @geolsoc.bsky.social for having us, and to all the enthusiastic visitors who were interested in our work. Thanks especially to @spissatella.bsky.social and Tessa for sharing your knowledge and helping out.

The library of the Geological Society of London with tables set out for the Festival of Geology.

A series of chalk fossils and information about life in the chalk seas.

If you're in #London today then come along to the @geolassoc.bsky.social FREE 'Festival of Geology' @geolsoc.bsky.social on Piccadilly. We'll be there showcasing some #chalk fossils and talking about our work on #Cretaceous ecosystems and environmental change. Come and say hello!

Ammolite shells tend to be very obviously compressed. Also its not only found in Placenticeras in Canada - I've seen ammolite specimens of both Baculites (a 'heteromorph') and Sphenodiscus in the Campanian and Maastrichtian of the US Western Interior.

Weird paper. I've looked at hundreds of SEMs of ammonite nacre, including ammolite. It's clear when you compare that nacre tablets are compressed and the interstitial gaps (normally full of organics) are closed in ammolite. Definitely due to specific diagenetic conditions after death & burial.

Glad I'm not the only one who does this!

One of the pictures of posterboards saying "How is the USGS meaningful to you?" - absolutely covered in post its expressing support and praising their science

USGS missing from GSA 💔⚒️

From reddit: www.reddit.com/r/geology/co...

A man stands on a stage presenting a talk. On the screen are pictures of chalk fossils.

A room full of people looking at a screen advertising a conference session on the KPg boundary.

Two men stand on a rock outcrop talking to a group of people. One of them is pointing at a map.

Four men stand behind a table on which are laid several drill cores of rock.

Wonderful week in San Antonio 🇺🇸 @geosociety.bsky.social meeting. Somehow managed to chair x2 sessions on the K-Pg extinction & cephalopod palaeobiology, present a talk & poster on our @chalksea.bsky.social work, & co-lead a fieldtrip to the Brazos River K-Pg boundary & Gulf Coast core repository! 🫡

A billboard on the side of a large building advertising the Geological Society of America Connects 2025 conference.

A man stands at a podium delivering a scke tirich talk. On the screen are images of chalk cliffs and a map.

A large poster on a black board.

Great to be in San Antonio, Texas this week! 🇺🇸 We were at the @geosociety.bsky.social annual meeting, where @jdwitts.bsky.social & project PI Rich Twitchett presented a talk and poster on the latest science from ChaSE, studying #Cretaceous environmental and marine ecosystem change.

Stephen Bush on the extraordinary draft legislation which Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, Matt Vickers, Katie Lam and backbench colleagues have proposed in parliament

It is a proposal that would seek to deport around 5% of the resident population, including over a quarter of a million with ILR

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
- Philip K. Dick

A museum drawer full of ball-shaped crinoid fossils.

A fossil crinoid belonging to the genus Marsupites

A pencil drawing of the test (skeleton) of the crinoid Uintacrinus.

A pencil drawing of a crinoid skeleton.

Historic specimens of the unusual #Cretaceous crinoids Marsupites and Uintacrinus @nhm-london.bsky.social made by Dr Arthur Rowe in the 1900s, including some beautiful pencil drawings. These extinct 'sea lilies' are abundant at certain levels in the #chalk making them useful for global correlation.

Fraud, AI slop and huge profits: is science publishing broken? – podcast Scientists warn academic publishing needs reform in order to retain trust in research system. Ian Sample talks to Madeleine Finlay and Dr Mark Hanson proposes potential solutions

Another great resource on the realities of scientific publishing by The Guardian (this time in audio format!)

www.theguardian.com/science/audi...

An outcrop of chalk with a tape measure for scale. A prominent layer of dark shale - the 'Black Band' - runs through the middle of the sequence.

A large chalk pit under a blue sky. A man in a high vis jacket and hard hat is examining the rock outcrops.

A close up of a finely laminated rock showing small fossil burrows- proof thst even during an 'Ocean Anoxic Event' there was life on the sea floor.

A red poppy growing on rubbly chalk.

#FossilFriday from the chalk seas of #Yorkshire - a good day in the field yesterday sampling a working chalk pit containing outcrops of the 'Black Band'; corresponding to #Cretaceous Ocean Anoxic Event 2. Thanks to the folks at Ashcourt Group for facilitating our visit!

👀

Wiley set to earn $44m from AI rights deals, confirms “no opt-out" for authors The US publisher is the latest to capitalise on deals to give tech firms access to its authors’ content to train their Large Language Models (LLMs).

Everybody makes money out of academic authors except the authors...News.

Wiley is the latest academic publisher to reach a multi-million deal to allow access to its content to AI developers, with no opt out, let alone payment, for the authors who created that content.

British politics is basically a doom spiral of increasingly unhinged hostile policies.

Reform says something unhinged
⬇️
Labour counters with their own unhinged policy
⬇️
Tories shout from back they'll be even more unhinged
⬇️
Reform announces different unhinged proposal in response
⬇️
And repeat...🔁

Ammonoid Paleobiology: From anatomy to ecology This two-volume work is a testament to the abiding interest and human fascination with ammonites. We offer a new model to explain the morphogenesis of septa and the shell, we explore their habitats by the content of stable isotopes in their shells, we discuss the origin and later evolution of this important clade, and we deliver hypotheses on its demise. The Ammonoidea produced a great number of species that can be used in biostratigraphy and possibly, this is the macrofossil group, which has been used the most for that purpose. Nevertheless, many aspects of their anatomy, mode of life, development or paleobiogeographic distribution are still poorly known. Themes treated are biostratigraphy, paleoecology, paleoenvironment, paleobiogeography, evolution, phylogeny, and ontogeny. Advances such as an explosion of new information about ammonites, new technologies such as isotopic analysis, tomography and virtual paleontology in general, as well as continuous discovery of newfossil finds have given us the opportunity to present a comprehensive and timely "state of the art" compilation. Moreover, it also points the way for future studies to further enhance our understanding of this endlessly fascinating group of organisms.

10 years ago, our co-edited Topics in Geobiology volumes on #Ammonoid #Paleobiology came out:

From anatomy to ecology:
doi.org/10.1007/978-...
From macroevolution to paleogeography: doi.org/10.1007/978-...

In the last months of 2025, i will explore new discoveries on these topics in a thread:

bsky.app/profile/jdwi...

I'd never even heard of Charlie Kirk until he was killed. Neither had most 🇬🇧 people I know in Real Life. 🙄

🧵🧪 In session on policy and societal requirements at the Royal Society discussion meeting today, Prof Hans-Otto Pörtner, former Co-Chair of the IPCC Working Group II, stated that he thinks keeping global temperature rise "below 1.5 [°C above pre-industrial] is probably now out of reach".

As a society, our financial system around information is insane. It is the kind of system you would create if you wanted everyone to go insane.

Sea urchin metamorphosis is maybe one of the most radical event in developmental biology. In just about an hour, these little pluteus larvae completely reorganize their entire body plan.

Very happy that this video got awarded an honorable mention by #NikonSmallWorld 😃

Slimehead Size Through Time: Testing the Temperature–Size Relationship in Late Cretaceous Trachichthyidae In this study, we use the extensive fossil record of the extinct Late Cretaceous Trachichthyid fish genus, Hoplopteryx, from the British Chalk Group to explore how this family responded to past clima...

🚨New ChaSE paper!🚨 'Slimehead Size Through Time'. Led by Masters student Chloe Griffiths, we used #chalk collections @nhm-london.bsky.social of the 🐟 genus Hoplopteryx & stable isotope analyses @ucl.ac.uk to see how fish body size varied with #Cretaceous climate change. 🌡📏 doi.org/10.1002/ece3...