@daverodland.bsky.social
Necromancer for hire. 🧪⚒️🦪🌊☠️ Paleoecology, taphonomy, sed/strat, marine biology, mass extinction ... all things Earth history. Doomed to repeat it whether we learn from it or not. Living in the past and talking to dead things since the late Holocene.
If *I* see Bonedog in the woods, it's getting treats and skritchens.
Chapter 11 in Nettle & Thorn, and I suspect Bonedog would be more alarming.
We put in wireless security cameras after an incident, and they have proven very good at catching cats. Wifi connection is dodgier than I like though.
In grad school, for reasons that remain unclear in retrospect but seemed like a good idea at the time, our class on trace fossils developed an informal tradition of summarizing our presentations in haiku or other poetic style.
I used The Raven as my template once.
El Niño Watch issued today by NOAA. Looks like record global temps in 2027 (and maybe even 2026) are virtually a lock, based on the strong likelihood of a potent 2026-27 event.
70s and thunderstorms yesterday, 36° this morning.
Sunday forecast high: 72°, Monday low: 21° and snow
Welcome to climate change, where the weather's made up and the seasons don't matter.
My favorite GIF (and I have many!)
Columbus Zoo (Ohio) also has a successful breeding program.
Add AI.
I've seen 'em with stromatolites (presumed photic zone), I've seen 'em reduced, magnetic and normally graded (presumably deep water turbidites). One of my colleagues slabbed one with bands of quartz infilled sigmoidal shear cracks (soft sed slope deformation). So, yeah.
Their pants are too short, too. Back in my day, the kids would mock them for expecting to wade thru flood waters.
Oh, that carbonate mud is something else! 😆
I remember learning the varve interpretation in undergrad, to discover later that it was in doubt. My baseline assumption is that BIFs were deposited in SO MANY different sedimentary environments, across a wide depth range ... I can't imagine they're all the same temporal resolution.
No, I haven't read it either.
I had to look it up out of curiosity when I discovered my former institution used to require every student spend a semester translating it, as part of their formal introduction to classical literature. Xenophon was apparently good for that!
One of the tragedies of losing the "classical" education is that nobody reads Anabasis anymore (especially not in the original Greek). It's really essential reading for anyone who wants to put boots on the ground in Persia.
TL;DR: never get involved in a land war in Asia.
It's an enhancement, not a replacement.
Linked down thread.
Those are the deep cuts!
Probably, but it's biology ... they'll always find a new way to surprise you.
Stegosaurus had the worst spring allergies.
On a more serious note: because the early Cretaceous extinction of stegosaurs coincides with the rapid diversification of angiosperms, people have speculated about that linkage for years. Proving it is a lot harder.
Still amazing every time I see it.
Seeing that video of Spirula the first time was amazing ... nobody imagined it oriented that way in life. It has these beautiful little internal chambered conchs like a nautilus, but entirely within the bottom part of the mantle!
So, it's basically balancing upright on the floaty end.
Generally, I think 'creatively reworded acronyms & punctuation' are CRAP, but this one's a stinker to be proud of. Bravo!
Libraries are critical players in this!
Beyond providing many free public services (seriously, so many things beyond borrowing books), beyond introducing and recommending people to creators who they might never have discovered on their own ... libraries pay much more to secure circulation rights.
Celebrating #MolluskMonday with one of the old taphonomy lab specimens. They really broke the mold with this one! ⚒️🧪🦪
Moldic preservation involves diagenetic alteration of a fossil - in this case, a bivalve mollusk. Acidic groundwater dissolved the shell, but the exterior impressions survived.
I'm deeply fascinated by 'em, and got started with the Ordovician ostracoderms, but there's a lot more expertise here than I have on offer. @jackstack.bsky.social ? @friedmanlab.bsky.social ? Thoughts on freshwater sharks?
There are some facultatively freshwater sharks in the modern (bull sharks come to mind) ... but I am far from an expert in chondrichthyan phylogeny. So, best I can do is ... we still have some?
It is so frustrating, cooking well for one, and facing the prospect that there are at least two more meals left over.
You never had control.
You're putting too much pressure on yourself.
What control can a human possibly have?
You are but one being against the staggering unyielding Cycle of the universe.
To chase control is an exercise in futility.
Mmm, mixed clastic/carbonate shell beds ....
Trying to remember, but isn't there an argument for hederelloids being a different variety of colonial lophophorate?
Yes, that's why I specified richness. Morphological disparity and richness decouple from each other as diversity metrics in Cretaceous non-avian dinosaurs. It gets complicated!