Duncan McIlroy

📅 5 years ago we had an online conference about geoheritage, and a few of us thought "wouldn't it be good if there was a special day for geodiversity".

🇺🇳 So we worked together to create it.

🏞 And now the world talks about geodiversity on Oct 6th.

😊 Happy #GeodiversityDay

this is a fabulous story :-)

some seafloor necromass. At the type locality in @discoverygeoparknl.bsky.social #unesco #geopark
the Lydonia are surrounded by and even over growing #Fractofusus andersoni. I couldn’t get a more fluffy #beggiatoa -like matground to look right so i went with something sparser.

depiction of #ediacaran microbe covered seafloor reclaiming (pink) fractofusus necromass being simultaneously overgrown by a papillate yellow sponge relative #Lydonia jiggamintia

Happy #FossilFriday ! When we were in the late stages of publishing the new #Ediacaran #Lydonia jiggamintia i was in very early phases of learning digital painting (I have been sculpting for a while now). and realized i wanted to try to depict a matground covered seafloor starting to reclaim #sciart

An Ocean of Possibilities - The Romance of Research - TOHOKU UNIVERSITY There’s no hierarchy in my lab. If you need to learn something, you just find the person who knows how to do it best.” - Cheryl Ames - Professor, WPI-AIMEC & Graduate School of Agricultural Science, T...

Very proud of my former student and longtime collaborator and friend Cheryl Lewis Ames. www.tohoku.ac.jp/romance/en/0...

On the land Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have a special attachment to our home — not just to the vibrant culture found in our communities, but to the ground beneath our feet.

Some lovely coverage of our supportive relationship with @discoverygeoparknl.bsky.social in this article from Memorial.

it has been a longstanding commitment, established while Dr Jack Matthews was with me at MUN, and with amazingly kind support from Edith Samson

gazette.mun.ca/public-engag...

What may be one of Earth’s earliest animals has a punk rock vibe Squiggly markings like a punk rock hairdo led researchers to identify the remains as spongelike animals that may have lived around 560 million years ago.

#Ediacaran animals with a punk rock vibe.

what is not to like :-)

www.sciencenews.org/article/eart...

#Lydonia @discoverygeoparknl.bsky.social

And that's how you integrate digital elements into an exhibition. Part of the temporary "China's Dinosaur World" at the Shanghai Natural History Museum, China. Closing this November.

Video source: Shanghai Let's Meet

that’s a gorgeous reconstruction

Happy #FossilFriday from the #Ediacaran of Inner Meadow in Newfoundland. The meadow is beautiful this time of year and it is great for the clearing work. Here is a newly exposed #Charnia masoni. The first masoni from this site, our faunal list is getting long!

Dr Bob Hooper in the Shed at Bonne Bay

Bob Hooper was my friend and predecessor in the role of Director at Bonne Bay Aquarium and Research Station. I am going to miss this lovely human. Anyone who knew Bob might like to watch this. #BonneBay m.youtube.com/watch?v=G1Dk...

that is very atmospheric Bob

amazing!

or gale forss win(d)

Playmobil figure kitted out as prehistoric iceman Ötzi.

#OTD 19 September 1991, walkers in the high Ötztal alps on the Italian border, found a body melting out of the ice. It turned out to be the remains of a c.5200 year old man preserved with all his kit.
Of course, it was essential to replicate him in Playmobil.
1🧵
#PlaymobilÖtzi
#PlaymobilInfestation

That seems like a very long time ago Tony!

Gray and black mottled rock surface with a light-yellow trail crossing it from the middle-left to lower right of the photo; to the right is a prone Paleontologist Barbie doll (African-American version with long black hair) wearing a proper broad-brimmed hat for field work, a pink kerchief around her neck, and a shirt with motifs of animal tracks and dinosaurs on it).

For #FossilFriday, one of the oldest known animal trace fossils interpreted from the geologic record (~565 million years old) preserved as a tiny trail on a bedding plane at Mistaken Point, NewFoundland (Canada), investigated during a 2012 visit by our hero, Paleontologist Barbie. 🧪🐾🪨⚒️

the analogue we use to reconstruct #Lydonia. The modern encrusting sponge Polymastia (no direct affinity implied) which is yellow with long papillae sitting amidst rhodoliths in the Bonne Bay Aquarium and Research station from my time as Director there.

we would love to find out!

to an aquiferous system analogous to that of sponges. Lydonia is currently known from @discoverygeoparknl.bsky.social and @mistakenpoint.bsky.social in rock about 565 million years old. We are not sure what John Lydon will make of being compared to a fossil that grew on rotten animals, but…

two #Lydonia jiggamintia on the Johnson Discovery Surface in Discovery UNESCO Global Geopark showing the oval morph and pimply surface

his style, especially his spiked hair. We have brought these two together in the name Lydonia jiggamintia which we use for an early encrusting sponge that grew over the rotting tissues of rangeomorph #Ediacaran organisms, with an upper surface covered with papillae that were probably the entrance

painting of the beothuk woman Shanawdithit. The beothuk were rendered culturally extinct by european settlers, what we know of that vanished culture comes from the art and stories of this amazing woman. Painting by Henry Gosse taken from Shanawdithit’s wikipedia page

John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) showing his iconic spiky hair that is compared to the short spiky papillae of Lydonia

My seafloor reconstruction of Lydonia jiggamintia showing a yellowish sponge with short spikes (papillae) overgrowing a dead Rangeomorph (pinkish) #Fractofusus. the seafloor and Fractofusus are covered in whitish microbes and microbial filaments representing the matgrounds typical of #Ediacaran seafloors

happy #FossilFriday! in the 1820’s a captive Beothuk woman Shanawdithit created a word list including jiggamint (spiky gooseberry). She was the last of her people & from what we know a truly amazing person.
In the 1970’s punk icon John Lyndon (Johnny Rotten) inspired a generation with angst and..

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New Paper by Parry et al., reinterpreting the oldest diverse #jellyfish fauna as sessile polypoid dinomischids 🪼

These findings significantly expand the temporal and geographical range of dinomischids, elucidating their morphological and taphonomic variation.

buff.ly/ERV7P3C

#PaleoSky #Fossils

haha you can see their point though :-).

I presume you are not related. If you had spiky hair it could have been after spiky topped palaeobotanist..

Lydonia jiggamintia The macrofossil Lydonia jiggamintia gen. et sp. nov. from the Ediacaran of Newfoundland (Canada): From pseudofossil to metazoan-grade organism

and you can find the paper here (open access) palaeo-electronica.org/content/2025...

other taxa which might constitute saprotrophy, living on rotten organic matter. The species name is derived from the word for the spiky current (gooseberry) in the language of the culturally exterminated Beothuk. The word jiggamint was collected from the captured Beothuk woman #Shanawdithit.

we have since been working towards redescribing the newfoundland “Blackbrookia” and consider it to have been a spiky topped sponge-relative and today it has a new name! Lydonia jiggamintia. Lydonia is named for spiky topped punk legend John Lydon [aka Johnny Rotten]. Lydonia sometimes overgrew

Artwork (c) Duncan McIlroy showing Lydonia jiggamintia over growing another dead organism on a microbe covered seafloor. Lydonia is a yellow encrusting structure with yellow spikes on top (papillae). The (pinkish) organism is a fractal rangeomorph called Fractofusus.

In 1992 I visited the type material of #Blackbrookia in @charnwoodforest.bsky.social with my then PhD supervisor Martin Brasier and decided between us it wasn’t a body fossil but a microbial mat. In 2008 Blackbrookia was used to describe pimply structures from @discoverygeoparknl.bsky.social

if you have already made big bold claims based on a dataset and then new taxonomy messes with your dataset so that it affects the believability of your original work, or requires you to review it at least, for some people that is something they feel the need to defend themselves against.

I try to radicalize my students into observing nature & deriving joy & wonder from their personal discoveries.