Robert Boessenecker, Dr. of Whaleontology ™️

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

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...

A sleepy female sea otter taking a nap in the water under a dock; she's quite old, and her face and neck are completely white.

I saw this tired little lady trying to take a nap under the dock at Morro Bay yesterday while I was looking for sea slugs - southern sea otter, Enhydra lutris. 🐬

The moon tonight! It looked very beautiful. I hope you enjoy! #moon #space #astronomy #astrophotography

A double crested Cormorant swimming through the water

All cormorants are beautiful 🪶

Otodontid and smaller sharks snacking on a large Llanocetus. #paleoart

We focused on Polish paleontologists turned victims of Nazi aggression, but what about academics who voluntarily joined Nazi ranks & what consequences (if any) they faced? A thread about Jurassic bivalve researcher, Dr. Richard Lebküchner, a sadist responsible for deaths of 50 East Europeans 🧵

I could watch this guy feed fish for hours.

a wispy nebula in a field of stars that looks reminiscent of a witch's broom

NGC 6960 - The Western Veil Nebula

NGC 6960 is a supernova remnant from a star that exploded between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago - this star was 20 times more massive than our sun! When this star exploded, it would have been one of the brightest objects in the night sky, & visible during the day.

bro needs a tiny comb

A gigantic shell of a three million year old tortoise from on display in a glass cabinet. The middle and front of the shell are preserved well, but the sides of the shell are gone.

A gigantic shell of a three million year old tortoise from on display in a glass cabinet. The middle and front of the shell are preserved well, but the sides of the shell are gone.

#fossilfriday A gigantic (~1.5 m long) tortoise (Hesperotestudo) from the Pliocene Tehama Formation (3 myo) of Red Bluff in northern California, collected by my friend Dick Hilton in 2002. On display at the Sierra College NHM in Rocklin, CA. Still undescribed as far as I'm aware.

starting to think we should give "strange women lying in ponds distributing swords" a chance as a basis for our system of government

Rare woolly rhino mummies emerge from the permafrost The new finds confirm the existence of a feature seen in cave art.

From 2024: Woolly rhino fossils are abundant, but their mummies are exceedingly rare. The three mummies in this paper all hail from Yakutia—also known as the Sakha Republic—in northeastern Russia, but they are vastly different in age and preservation.

arstechnica.com/science/2024...

A view towards South Lake Tahoe with an ocean of fir, pine, and cedar trees with distant mountains above them in the distance, cloaked in shadows from the afternoon thunderstorm clouds.

Had a nice view from our hike yesterday. Lake Tahoe, CA.

What I said earlier.

Drawer of Xiphactinus bits in boxes.

Drawer of Xiphactinus bits in boxes.

Xiphactinus . . . there's always more Xiphactinus.

Seastars and anemones on a rock

More seastars and anemones

A seastar devouring a mollusk

Massive anemones

The tide-pools were dressed in their finery yesterday! Healthy and abundant! Watching sea stars devour things slowly, anemones in mad masses, mollusk nurseries - so fantastic!

#tidepools #seastars #anemones #oregoncoast #beachhike #marinelife #photography #love

It's difficult to comprehend how the destruction of American science is a body blow to the world; not just in terms of quality of research but the quantity, the loss of capacity, breadth and depth and the loss of potential

this is adorable and so lovely 😍

More than Meets the Eye🌱

Obscure controversies in Cenozoic marine vertebrate paleontology 4: when did baleen whales become gigantic? For earlier entries in this series, check out these links: Obscure controversies in Cenozoic marine vertebrate paleontology 1: taxonomic ...

For #whalewednesday - When did baleen whales evolve to be gigantic? In this blog post I evaluate two hypotheses: a gradual development of body size, or instead - a delayed and sudden trend towards gigantism during the ice age? 🐋🦖🧪

X post by @nobushiromasaki. JP text: カムチャッカ半島付近の大地震（M8.0）による津波、日本各地にも1m程度の津波が来るという注意報が出てる。侮らないで。1mは、ふつうに自動車が流されるレベルです。画像は拾い物だけど、これが本当だから。沿岸地域の方、特に気をつけて！

On X, Masaki Nobushiro posts a recurring (and useful) drawing about how people wrongly think a 1m tsunami is a cresting wave when it's actually a wall of water filled with dangerous and deadly debris that's strong enough to sweep up a car.

#tsunami

Illustration of a woolly mammoth walking in a grassland. In the background a group of extinct horses running

Let me share with you this illustration I did for the package art of one of the amazing upcoming Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) figures both for Beasts of the Cenozoic and Eons Proboscidean Figures

#paleoart #sciart #mammoth

NYC Mass Shooting Was Nearly Impossible to Prevent, Experts Say

Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.

never dealt with it in the Caribbean or Florida! It's mostly cleared up. But ah, shoulda figured with a name like "bird rock"

This was at Bird Rock a little bit further south - which I would not recommend, since I got swimmer's itch from this snorkeling session 😑

What unit is this from? Otekaike, Ototora?

Here's a nice Oligocene temperate water limestone photomicrograph from NZ, in PPL, with a glauconite-filled benthic foram, lots of bryozoa, some barnacle plates, echinoderm spines & plates, & the odd bivalve or gastropod fragment, all set in drusy calcite cement. Bar scale is 200 microns.

Here's a nice Oligocene temperate water limestone photomicrograph from NZ, in PPL, with a glauconite-filled benthic foram, lots of bryozoa, some barnacle plates, echinoderm spines & plates, & the odd bivalve or gastropod fragment, all set in drusy calcite cement. Bar scale is 200 microns.
⚒️🧪🌊

🦬 Think bison are just plains animals? 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘪𝘯. These Ice Age heavyweights once thundered through what’s now Los Angeles—and they left their mark at the #TarPits: bit.ly/BisonHerd

GOES West captured von Kármán vortices streaming around Guadalupe Island this morning. These cloud formations typically occur when the prevailing wind is diverted by elevated land features such as islands, mountaintops, or volcanoes. More cloud science at: noaa.gov/jetstream/clouds