Diane A. Kelly

Whenever I see pseudoscientific conspiracy theories about ancient aliens or giant petrified trees or ice age satellites or whatever it drives me crazy because THE EARTH IS COOL ENOUGH JUST AS IT IS! WE DON’T NEED TO REACH FOR REASONS TO MAKE IT MORE INTERESTING! HAVE YOU SEEN A TULLY MONSTER??!!

ntroduce yourself with 5 concerts you've been to
Koko Taylor and Buddy Guy
They Might Be Giants
Violent Femmes
Fairport Convention
Philip Glass
(+1) Squirrel Nut Zippers

homemade peanut butter cookies — first you stress eat the raw dough, then you dip the finished cookies in milk and stress eat some more

An animated graphic showing wingbeats of different birds. This one is so beautiful.

Image: Eleanor Lutz

tabletopwhale.com/2014/09/29/f...

A thing I think about a lot is how the hyper powerful and tech billionaires want to be seen as people saving humanity, which is why they create space companies to send us to Mars and invest in gen AI to render us more "productive"

And yet, not a single one is working to solve climate change.

I’m so sorry, Carl. My condolences to your family.

PRI's Wonderful Life — Paleontological Research Institution By Dr. Warren Allmon , Director of the Paleontological Research Institution December 30, 2025 The holidays are a time for “Christmas movies” in my house, and one that is always on our list is&nbs...

PRI REACHED THEIR GOAL!!! MUSEUM OF THE EARTH IS STAYING OPEN!!! Thank you all so much for donating and spreading the word, I'm so overjoyed! Good things are still possible! www.priweb.org/blog-post/pr...

chris and lauras loveshack Join our cocktail making classes and learn to create your favorite drinks. Perfect for beginners and cocktail enthusiasts.

Revel Cafe and Bar - they recreate historical
cocktails and will talk your ear off about them revelcafeandbar.com

Maybe you can make pottery with little engraved galaxies or something on them?

Top: Dolops striata (Bouvier, 1899), preserved young (INPA 2277) removed from freshwater stingray Potamotrygon leopoldi (ANSP 197001, 440 mm maximum disk width) collected in rio Xingu ca. 54 km southeast of Altamira, 3°33'10.7"S, 51°51'22.2"W, 10 Mar 2014. Bottom: Dolops discoidalis (Bouvier, 1899), live specimens (INPA 2274) attached to large redtail catfish, Phractocephalus hemiliopterus (ANSP 198243) collected in rio Xingu channel, 3°24'54.3"S, 51°42'42.1"W, 8 Nov 2014. Photos by M. Sabaj. https://bioone.org/journals/proceedings-of-the-academy-of-natural-sciences-of-philadelphia/volume-166/issue-1/053.166.0105/Annotated-checklist-of-parasitic-and-decapod-crustaceans-from-the-middle/10.1635/053.166.0105.short

An (ecto)parasitic #Crustmas. This is Dolops (above), which swims around and attaches to fishes (below), but unlike its relative Argulus, which has suckers, it has hooks to hold on. Also, is bizarrely cute!
🧪🦑

Nah, it's too far off target.

I’m impressed! I worked with 35 mm xenon lamp projectors at my college film society, but never had to try carbon arc.

A male golden pheasant with a helmet of orange and black feathers (A) that is so large it partly obstructs his visual field (C) next to a female of the species with a head full of smaller gray feathers (B) that don't block her view above her head.

What I'm reading: The breeding plumage of male golden pheasants is beautiful, but blinds them to dangers from above. (This isn't true for the females.) The authors suggest it might be a 'handicap' letting males advertise their fitness to potential mates.
royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...

Movie you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (either War or Trek), LOTR, or Marvel.

Depends on the season. November, December, January, no snakes. Up to 4 in May or June.

These Enoploteuthid are so colorful. Nice look at the chromatophores. @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 874 #asgardarchaea #MarineLife

From the first moment I met you, your arrogance and conceit, your selfish disdain for the feelings of others made me realize that you were the last man in the world I could ever be prevailed upon to marry, Charlie Brown.

The only winning move is not to play, Charlie Brown.

There's an enormous dead sperm whale on the beach in Nantucket. Fortunately, 55 years ago we learned what NOT to do to deal with it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CL...

Can’t believe the whole country has to suffer through the return of Dickensian childhood diseases because the worst, most ignorant attention-demanders decided other people’s expertise makes them feel bad

The Casper octopus gets its nickname from its lack of pigment cells, which gives it a ghostly appearance.

Discovered in 2016 more than 4,000 meters below the ocean surface off Hawai’i, it is the deepest-known octopus without fins.

Amazing! Congratulations!

A notebook full of weird facts about animals mating and speculation on how that might apply to mothman and serpent folk and minotaurs.

The notebook I'm using for my sketch workshop today also has my notes from the Monsterotica Romantasy Biology Class dragoncon panel in it, and last night I hung out with @dianeakelly.bsky.social nerding out about echidna genitals.

Poor sweet Kevin McDonald might be in for some real weird sketches 😂

Hemipene from a water snake with spines segmented to illustrate diversity of shape within one species, some are like claws, others more needle like

Recent paper from our lab on the puncture performance of hemipene spines in snakes! Some are like cat claws, others barely puncture. A single species can have many different spine morphologies and thousands of spines! 🧪 🐍

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

Image of the mechanical ladder outside the Louvre Text below says WENN'S MAL WIEDER SCHNELL GEHEN MUSS (When you need to move fast) Underneath is more German text which translates as "The Böcker Agilo transports your treasures weighing up to 400kg at 42m/min - quiet as a whisper."

The German company that makes the mechanical ladder used in the Louvre heist has used the image to advertise, with the text 'When you need to move fast'

10/10 response, no notes

Two slugs mating.
Collecting material for the next #invertefest ;)
#biology #wildlife #invertebrates

Comic. [Giant balloon reminiscent of a hot air balloon but wavy and laying on the ground with “bloop” “bloop” sound effects. Two people are in a basket attached to one end of the balloon.] [caption] Hot water balloon rides turn out to be significantly less romantic than the air kind.

Hot Water Balloon

xkcd.com/3153/

A tumblr post that reads "WHo would have believed that the perfect wikipedia photo caption could have been improved upon?" Two identical images are then side by side. The first caption is "Piper Kerr, a member of the Scottis National Antarctix Expedition, plays the bagpipes for an indifferent penguin, March 1904". The Caption for the image on the left reads, "Piper Kerr (right), a member of the Scottis National Antarctix Expedition, plays the bagpipes for an indifferent penguin, March 1904"

i feel like i need to share this oldie but a goodie today

Image: A variation on Benjamin Franklin’s “Join, or Die” engraving, originally published in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1754. Each segment of the snake has the name of a university sent Trump’s “compact”: Texas, AZ, Vanderbilt, USC, Dartmouth, UVA, Brown, Penn, MIT.

Shared courtesy of my Penn History colleague, Ben Nathans

Boxes also work on bobcats