Joan Turmelle

A scene depicting the Patagonian scrubland in the early morning, dotted with araucarias and framed by foggy mountains in the background. A pair of Macrauchenia, four guanacos and a patagonian mara are seen among the grass. A Megatherium walks by further away and a crested caracara flies over the scene.

Foggy morning in Late Pleistocene Patagonia.

#Art #SciArt #artbyjulio

To unearth their past, Amazonian people turn to ‘a language white men understand’ A model partnership between archaeologists and the Kuikuro people has helped rewrite the history of early Amazonian societies

A nice story in @science.org this week about the collaboration between archaeologists and Kuikuro people in Brazil, which has been central to uncovering evidence of social complexity in the Amazon region more than 600 years ago.

www.science.org/content/arti...

YouTube video by Apple TV Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age — Season 3 Official Trailer | Apple TV

Yes, the #PrehistoricPlanetIceAge trailer is out today...

A Woolly Mammoth Primer — Tetrapod Zoology I’ve said before that proboscideans – the familiar group of placental mammals that includes living elephants and their many fossil relatives – have never been well served here at Tet Zoo…

New at Tetrapod Zoology, a brief look at what's surely the world's best known extinct proboscidean: that Ice Age superstar the Woolly mammoth .... tetzoo.com/blog/2025/11... #mammoths #IceAge #Pleistocene #fossilmammals #elephants

Alright, now that I'm not on the road - full thread on our new azhdarchoid phylogeny paper and what it means for pterosaurs big (like this one) and small! 1/23

"seal vs sea lion" "frog vs toad" "lynx vs bobcat" "turtle vs tortoise" STOP!!! STOP!!!! THAT THING IS JUST A SPECIFIC GROUP OF THAT OTHER THING!!

I'm pretty confident that certain online people are going to be cheering about how they were right all along on Nanotyrannus. Their take will be that they were right all along and their arguments, based on private specimens of uncertain provenance, photos of things without scale bars, and ideas...

Artist's recreation of Epiatheracerium itjilik in its forested lake habitat, Devon Island, Early Miocene, 23 million years ago. The plants and animals shown, including a rodent, rabbit and the transitional seal Puijila darwini, are all based on fossilized remains found at the site. Credit: Julius Csotonyi

#MasterPaleoartAppreciationPost
WAKE UP EVERYONE NEW JULIUS CSOTONYI ARTWORK JUST DROPPED

It's the sexism that bursts through the doors of preschools and schools, cleverly disguised in neuroscientific finery, that I find most disturbing. As neuroimaging takes its first steps on the long journey to understanding how neuronal firing yields mental abilities, you will find no shortage of so-called experts willing to explain the educational implications of differences in boy wiring and girl wiring. The medal for the most outrageous claim must surely go to an American educational speaker. According to reports sent to Mark Liberman's Language Log, this educational consultant has been informing audiences that girls see the details while boys see the big picture because the "crockus" -- a region of the brain that does not exist -- is four times larger in girls than in boys. -- Cordelia Fine, "Delusions of Gender"

A useful reminder that claims about basic biological differences between The Sexes have been in circulation for a long time, and that they've only ever been used to keep women subordinate, not to "protect" or uplift them. The crockus!

Australopithecine sketches that have fallen in to work in progress limbo #sciart

🏺🧪🦣 Was more than happy to speak to @killgrove.bsky.social for this: even if you ignored the horrendous, insurmountable ethical issues, what we'd learn would do almost nothing to advance our understanding of prehistoric #Neanderthal lives, nor our encounters with them.
There's zero justification.

Post by @joanjournal · 9 images 💬 0  🔁 1  ❤️ 0 · Reflections on Disney's Pocahontas · "We are all connected to each other, in a circle, in a hoop that never ends." (Walt Disney Animation Studios. All film screenshots are courtesy…

In the latest Joan's Journal, I discuss my elaborate thoughts on Disney's Pocahontas 🍂 I dive into the actual history of Matoaka & Jamestown and the production of the film, with scattered thoughts on the movie itself
www.tumblr.com/joanjournal/...

Museum display with a long-snouted, toothy skull in front of a mural of an awkward, dog-like creature.

So this AMNH Andrewsarchus display from the 60s is sick as hell, allowing for the outdated reconstruction and all that.

Yessss

Post by @joanjournal · 17 images 💬 0  🔁 1  ❤️ 1 · Race: Understanding Human Diversity - Part 3 (Finale) · Representations of the Out-of-Africa Expansion for Homo sapiens; A shows a map of early Eurasian individuals, B breaks down…

On the latest Joan's Journal & the conclusion of my series on Race and Human Diversity, I summarize the peopling of the Earth 🌍 www.tumblr.com/joanjournal/...

Post by @joanjournal · 8 images 💬 0  🔁 0  ❤️ 0 · Race: Understanding Human Diversity - Part 2 · Visualization of different conceptual models of race (from here) In the previous post, I outlined the history of racial anthropology…

After a short break, I've updated the latest Joan's Journal with Part 2 in my series on Race and Human Diversity. Here, I examine different physical and genetic traits as they are understood today by modern research 🌍
www.tumblr.com/joanjournal/...

SPERM WHALE EATING A GIANT SQUID--filmed probably for the first time *ever*!!! 🌊🦑🐳

Make your cool thing.

The way you feel about the cool things other people create? People will feel that about your cool thing, too.

Extremely Spiky Dinosaur a Reminder of Fossil Record's Surprises — Riley Black The discovery of an ornately-armored dinosaur underscores how much we don't yet know about the "terrible lizards."

No matter how well we think we know dinosaurs, there's so much left to learn. New blog from me about Spicomellus, a dinosaur that knew spiked collars are hot. 🧪

Australopithecus also known as ”Little foot” #Sciart

Sexual dimorphism of Australopithecus afarensis is striking and yet the hominins before it (Ardipithecus) and after it (Homo) are virtually monomorphic in most skeletal dimensions. Social evolution id a hell of a drug!

Beautifully done piece! 💖

Small and intricate pencil drawing of the head and partial neck of a Bactrian camel in profile, facing right. The drawing is photographed with a pencil and a penny, which could obscure about half of the camel's head.

I'm very fond of Bactrian camels.

Detail from a drawing from 2022. Brown and graphite pencils on Fabriano Medioevalis, 95 × 64 mm.

Dinosaur extinction can explain continental facies shifts at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary - Communications Earth & Environment Dinosaurs promoted open habitats in the Late Cretaceous, and their extinction could have led to a radical reorganization of the landscape and ecosystem structure at the beginning of the Paleogene, acc...

Out today in @commsearth.nature.com from some of my newest colleagues at UMMP: evidence that the extinction of dinosaurs led to fundamental shifts in terrestrial environments, and that this signal is recorded in facies shifts tied to the K-Pg boundary: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Sir David Attenborough, wearing a mask because of covid pandemic, flicking through a copy of Conway et al's book All Yesterdays.

Here's David Attenborough reading my book All Yesterdays, a photo I took back when we were working on Prehistoric Planet season 2. David owns more than one copy of that book because people kept buying them for him.

What I'd give to see a new exhibition like it...

Arranging a "Dinosaurs: An Artistic History" travelling show or something like it focusing on the interplay of dinosaur science and pop culture is a distant dream of mine, though it's admittedly something of an unlikely one.

A lot of oppressed people today are seeing our "allies" shed more tears for those who would murder us than those of us who have been/would've been murdered by them.

The “problem” with vaccines? They so effective at preventing deaths that they create generations of people that question whether disease was a problem in the first place because they have never experienced the horrors of a world without vaccines.

Bridger formation diorama by day.

Bridger formation diorama by night

Eocene formation in two parts...

It’s finally out!

Our work addressing the origins of reptiles is published in PCJ! peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10....

We use novel info gleaned from the scan data of dozens of stem reptiles to substantially revise our understanding of early reptile evolution #paleontology #herpetology