Anthony (Tony) J. Martin

Transition layer depth over the Phanerozoic. Gray lower curve reflects data with a lower-bound decompaction factor of 1.0 applied; green upper curve reflects data with an upper-bound decompaction factor of 3.0 applied. Curves produced by LOESS smoothing model with α = 0.3. Shaded areas are 95% confidence intervals. Geological timescale visualized using the R package deeptime (v1.1.1)

Nowadays, animals till the seafloor. They make holes, eat the organic matter buried there, and flush the sediment with water. But this system had to evolve through the Phanerozoic into its current form, with a few ups and down along the way. 🧪⚒️

Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

students and AI can both write shitty papers, but only students can write great papers. That's like the only lesson that they need to know when they decide to use it

A view of a rocky coast. The foreground is shallow seawater, with dark green seagrass visible at the bottom

Summer vacation means visiting these beautiful underwater meadows of Posidonia oceanica seagrass 🤿🌿🌊 Seagrasses evolved in the Cretaceous from terrestrial flowering plants that adapted to life in the ocean
#botany 1/2

Coot tracks are on my tracking life list. With feet like that, they must make awesomely odd tracks. 🧪🐾🐦

The reason so many people who went to a four year college with a live on campus structure think fondly of their experience is because they lived in a walkable community with easy access to their friends in an environment that intentionally fostered human connection

A ceratopsid-dominated tracksite from the Dinosaur Park Formation (Campanian) at Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, Canada The badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park (Alberta, Canada) are renowned for the exceptional abundance and diversity of Campanian-aged vertebrate body fossils, especially dinosaurs. Due to the steep ex...

Checkout this article I found at PLOS: dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Resetting with the properly spelled hashtag #Caturday because I want to make sure everyone has a chance to admire these sweet kitties.

Keep sciencing. We are living through a time when looking at a rock and wondering how old it is qualifies as an act of resistance.

Wing-assisted frolicking

Gallagher image showing sauropod with detailed positional info on skin anatomy.

John Conway art showing Diplodocus with elaborate skin anatomy.

DinoCon promo image showing Tess Gallagher in the field... with puppet friend.

In recent years, palaeobiologist Tess Gallagher has presented results that challenge ideas about sauropod dinosaur skin, and which have major implications for biology and appearance. Tess is covering this in her talk at #DinoConUK, Aug 16th-17th, Exeter! Go to dinocon.co.uk for tickets and info.

Siamese cat with dark points and blue eyes lying on a white blanket, his tail and legs folded to the right.

Tokinese cat lying on her left side and looking up, with dark brown fur and almost-black points and green eyes. Her belly fur is grasped in my right hand, a direct result of her insistence that I should rub or otherwise hold her there for comfort. As her staff, who am I to say no?

For #Caterday, the cats that own my spouse & me: Tao (pronounced TAY-o with Southern U.S. accent) and Sapelo. The latter is named after the Georgia barrier island because her fur color matches that of the Pleistocene bedrock there. She also requires eternal belly rubs. 🐈‍⬛🐈

A buzz saw like whorl of prehistoric chimera teeth

What a whorl.

Helicoprion tooth spirals were first described by paleontologists in 1886. How and where the whorls fit in the living fish was a mystery. It wasn’t until 2013 that CT scans of a whorl with some skull cartilage revealed its placement in the lower jaw of a prehistoric ratfish. 🧪

Researchers Determine Coelacanth Faked Own Extinction To Escape Massive Gambling Debt

Researchers Determine Coelacanth Faked Own Extinction To Escape Massive Gambling Debt theonion.com/researc...

#fossilfriday

Here is the well preserved sea urchin Coenolectypus planatus from the Lower Cretaceous (Albian) Glen Rose Formation from McLennon County, Texas.

A Carboniferous fossil - foliage from a seed fern

You can find something palaeobotanical in the British Museum if you try hard enough.

300 million year old seed fern foliage - maybe Neuropteris

#FossilFriday 🌏⚒🌿🔬🧪

Oh by the way, don’t forget you can ask your library to order nearly any book you want to read but don’t want to buy. And as authors we love libraries buying our books & readers being able to access them through libraries.

Cool seeing taught behaviors in woodpeckers! A fringe benefit of writing my book 'Life Sculpted' with @uchicagopress.bsky.social was researching & learning about the evolution & behaviors of woodpeckers, along with the wood-boring insects they eat (Chapter 7, 'Woodworking at Home'). 🧪🪵🐦

A rotund Ankylosaurus with studded armour and comically short neck and tail brandishes its club.

Today’s random piece of nostalgic palaeoart: Arnold Lobel’s Ankylosaurus!

Hailing from a strange time in ankylosaur artwork, this 1971 painting comes from the childhood classic “Dinosaur Time” by Peggy Parish. It was among my very first dinosaur books, and one which I used to learn to read! (1/5)

Brown Mosasaurus skeletons with jaws agape with a shimmering blue background

Happy #FossilFriday from Walker, the first Mosasaurus skeleton found in Kansas.

We excavated this 28 foot long murder lizard in 2014 and its reconstruction was my Covid work from home project

This cast is now part of a traveling exhibition in Japan, showing off all of its teeth to visitors

I love the stories traces tell. I often pass a spot on the sidewalk with muddy raccoon prints by a leaking sprinkler that makes a persistent puddle, a little Procyon hand wash station.

I'm curious about this, too. If yes, my students need to know this on Day 1 so they're fully aware, & I'll likewise pull most of my materials (especially original content).

“Tyrannosaurus zhuchengensis” material

#FossilFriday “Tyrannosaurus zhuchengensis” is the name originally given to several tyrannosaur teeth and a referred isolated metatarsal, that were recovered from the same quarry as Zhuchengtyrannus. The species was described in 2001, but is now a nomen dubium. 1/3

For me, Colossal’s framing of their work as literal de-extinction is misleading, & claiming that woolly elephants stamping around in Siberia will markedly help the climate crisis is a distraction.
Ultimately scientists need to *earn* trust. Our language matters as much as the work we do.

/end

This bizarre ancient worm had spiky teeth and a retractable throat Scientists found the 500-million-year-old fossil of a "penis worm" in the Grand Canyon—and reconstructed how the creature would have used its strange mouth to feed.

My latest for National Geographic! I, like so many talented science writers, was summoned to write about the Grand Canyon penis worm

Monthly reminder: Many people have a book in them, but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness, cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain, find the Blade of No One Made You Do This, and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.

Natural casts of probable hadrosaur dinosaur tracks displayed on two shelves; tracks are dark gray and have three toes on one end, and their widths and lengths are about the same. The upper shelf has a series of six tracks arranged in order of size, with the smallest on the left and the largest on the right, whereas the lower shelf has two tracks that are about twice as big as the largest on the above shelf. Tracks on display in the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah.

For #FossilFriday, natural casts of Late Cretaceous (~70 mya) ornithopod dinosaur tracks with a range of sizes from small to large. Tracks were probably made by hadrosaurs & commonly found coal mines in eastern Utah. Display in the @prehistoricmuseum.bsky.social, Price, Utah. 🧪🦕🦖🐾 #ichnology

I lived with this annual cycle for so long (my whole adult life, really!) and it was one of the strangest parts of switching careers - as the end of that first summer approached, I felt my stress rising and had to realize, like, "Wait, nothing is changing, I'm fine!"

Hey, @ugapress.bsky.social updated their website & it looks great! While there, stroll over to the following page for my 2020 book, 'Tracking The Golden Isles: The Natural and Human Histories of the Georgia Coast' & order it for you, a friend, or your library. 🧪📚🐾🌊
www.ugapress.org/978082035696...

Behold my very first non-avian dinosaur fossil find.🦖🦷 #FossilFriday

Working with fossils can feel like you're walking on eggshells 🥚—and sometimes, you are!

Dr. John Scannella holds 76-million-year-old dino eggshell at Egg Mountain - declared an International Geoheritage Site in 2025.

🔊 Listen now to learn more!
www.paleonerds.com/podcast/john...