That’s fantastic!

#MolluscMonday Balanced on a wall beneath the ice-cream parlour at Aubeterre (Charente, France) is a fossil of the large rudist bivalve Hippurites, probably collected from a local field underlain by Campanian limestones.

A large wading bird with a powerful beak, dark blue on the sides of the head, and gray on the neck, wings, and body, with dark blue at the trailing edge of the wing. It is standing in shallow water with a green grassy shore in the background.

It's a beautiful day here in Pennsylvania. Here a Great Blue Heron shakes things out during golden hour. Despite their large size, Great Blue Herons only weight about 5 to 6 lbs, thanks to hollow bones.

Anyway, personal growth is good. Well done.

The fess is not that they looked awful, it’s that you were ever deluded enough to think they might not.

Most American ecologists and palaeontologists I’ve met say it to rhyme with stitch.

#FossilFriday Sectioned stems of the Jurassic crinoid Apiocrinus in the paving stones around the Place de la Bourse, Bordeaux. From Burgundy to Bordeaux.

Music and modern languages courses suspended at University of Nottingham In a statement the institution also says it is

Horrific, stupid news from @uniofnottingham.bsky.social — they are closing their music department. Apparently they all found out suddently in a meeting yesterday.

It is one of the best music departments in the country — solidarity with my colleagues and their students

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

hey I dunno who needs to hear this today but if your toddler decides that they’re obsessed with beetroot and eats like half a kg of it for dinner

warn your nursery the next day

I nearly called an ambulance once with my eldest for exactly this reason. Sheer horror.

I have precisely no reason to need this but I WANT THEM ALL

Yup. Product not as advertised. Can’t see the problem here.

Looking up at a large, mature Beech tree. The trunk is wide and the branches are thick and almost horizontal. It’s autumn and the leaves are beginning to turn, the ground underneath is covered with copper coloured leaves.

A magnificent Beech in Gight Wood - one of the last remnants of ancient woodland in Aberdeenshire, Scotland #ThickTrunkTuesday 🌳🍁📸

Amnesty bid to retrieve Cornwall's overdue library books All fines will be waived for the duration of the book amnesty which is being held throughout November.

Bit of a reduction in ambition from when they used to be all about freeing Nelson Mandela.
search.app/YuxQ5

Side view macro photograph of a large black beetle with densely dimpled elytra, standing amid yellow fall leaf litter. An oval orange shape is visible on the side of the beetle.

I wasn't that excited about this stock standard photo of a darkling beetle (Eleodes goryi), until I noticed the parasitic tachinid fly egg attached above the insect's midleg. This beetle is on borrowed time.

Egyptian Foreign MInister Badr Abdelaty was gifted a LEGO set of the Great Pyramid of Giza by the Danish Foreign MInister during his visit for the Grand Egyptian Museum's opening. Look how happy he is.

Denmark: turning diplomacy into DUPLOmacy.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelaty was gifted a LEGO set of the Great Pyramid of Giza by the Danish Foreign Minister during his visit for the Grand Egyptian Museum's opening.

Look how happy he is.

#MolluscMonday Spirals from the Cretaceous: sections of fossil snail shells in the pavements of Libourne and Bordeaux, SW France.

Try and make space for patch of white dead nettles (Lamium album) in your garden, they flower throughout the year (mostly) providing nectar for late & early bumblebees. @lgspace.bsky.social @worcswt.bsky.social

Macro photo in side view of a giant black hairy robber fly, dramatically lit, standing on a broken stick.

A better shot of the Beelzebub bee-eater fly, Mallophora leschenaulti.

Are you aware of toilets?

#FossilFriday A bonus fossil for #Halloween: the ghoulish ‘face’ of a sectioned Carboniferous brachiopod from a Winchester Cathedral gravestone.

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

I agree, adding that I’m very concerned about its effects on adult brains too. I think it’s much more psychologically dangerous to interact with an LLM designed to reflect your own ideas back flatteringly than to post on social media, where someone will always be ready to call you a c***

Fungi, such a diverse group.

Why don’t you wish the decision was made and the forest was saved? Your life can move on and your partner wouldn’t be heartbroken. That’s better, right?

Apparently it’s getting colder.

A harvester with a brown body the has a green hourglass shaped pattern on the top surface. It is standing on a leaf.

A newly described species in 2024, this snazzy harvester is from the Andes Mountains in Colombia. The emerald-green hourglass-shaped dorsal pattern is one of the key identifying characteristics of the arachnid. #Arachtober
(Quindina horologium) Tatama National Park, 2023

An orange harvester with yellow on the edges of its body. It is standing over a small puddle of water on a leaf and getting a drink.

Most people don't think about arachnids needing water, but they do need some water. Here a harvester gets a drink from a small puddle of moisture. I don't have an ID for this one yet, but believe it belongs to Superfamily Gonyleptoidea.
Bella Vista Cloud Forest Preserve, Ecuador, 2023
#Arachtober

#FossilFriday Not to be outdone by Isaac Newton who is buried beneath a gastropod fossil in Westminster Abbey, the famous geologist Charles Lyell’s gravestone is Carboniferous crinoidal limestone full of columnals of these ‘sea-lilies’.

Started buying Lego for the kids. Now we spend more on it for ourselves than for them.