Sarah Boessenecker, MSc. 🏛️🔭

A California spiny lobster on a flat, algae covered slab; it's a tan/brown color, with black and orange striped legs, very long antennae with purplish bases.

A California spiny lobster on a flat, algae covered slab; it's a tan/brown color, with black and orange striped legs, very long antennae with purplish bases. The antennae are pointed right at the camera.

A California spiny lobster on a sandy bottom in a deep tide pool channel; it's a tan/brown color, with black and orange striped legs, very long antennae with purplish bases. It is eating a california mussel.

A California spiny lobster on a sandy bottom in a deep tide pool channel; it's a tan/brown color, with black and orange striped legs, very long antennae with purplish bases. It is eating a california mussel.

We also had some fantastic out-in-the-open lobster sightings! Usually these guys are tucked inside crevices and you just see their face and antennae, but we saw several out and about in broad daylight. California spiny lobster, Panulirus interruptus. In the last 2 pics it's eating a mussel!🤿🦑🦀

Nudibranch hunting in northern California: snapshots from winter tidepooling in Half Moon Bay, CA This post has more to do with the coastal part of the title and less to do with the paleo part - I'll be doing more of these, since I figure...

🦀Minus tides are coming! Our first daytime minus tide of the fall is today (in SoCal anyway), though I probably won't go out until tomorrow. But, you know what that means: more nudi pics! And by that I mean nudibranchs, lovely colorful little sea slugs:

coastalpaleo.blogspot.com/2024/03/nudi...

Large long haired black and white cat posing for a picture next to a sliding door

This cat KNOWS he's pretty, and loves to ham it up for pictures 🖤🤍@coastalpaleo.bsky.social

A black and white skeletal reconstruction of Xenorophus sloanii, and a pair of photos of the skull and neck vertebrae of the best known specimen in top and side view.

#whalewednesday The spectacular early toothed whale Xenorophus sloanii from the Oligocene (~28 mya) of South Carolina! This is a critical transitional fossil, known from about a dozen skulls and partial skeletons. Read more about Xenorophus here on my blog: coastalpaleo.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-...

An underwater photograph of an octopus in its hole; the arm is wrapped around the eye, and pale red, whereas the head is bluish green.

For #worldoctopusday here is my favorite photo I've taken of an octopus, in a hole in a rock about 10 feet down while snorkeling. Octopus are quite hard to spot unless they're moving! This one is a rather small (perhaps ~2' wide) American Octopus, Octopus americana. 🦑🦀🧪🤿

A well-preserved molar of an extinct dolphin with dark brown enamel and a tan root; the crown is triangular with several accessory cusps. The lingual side has several short vertical ridges. The mesial edge of the tooth is serrated.

#fossilfriday I find early whale and dolphin teeth to be quite beautiful and unusual. This is a lower molar of an extinct, as-yet unnamed simocetid dolphin (?Olympicetus) from the early Oligocene Makah Formation of Washington, USA. Acid prepared; collected by Jim Goedert. 🦖🐬 #whaleontology

A school of smelt - silvery long schooling fish - swim between kelp stalks just below the water surface.

Some senorita fish swimming adjacent to a kelp stalk.

Many strands of giant kelp in a kelp forest canopy.

Many strands of kelp in a kelp forest canopy - the blades have been grazed extensively in the warm water.

Some of my more beautiful kelp forest photos from August, when I went out snorkeling with @joshualudtke.bsky.social at La Jolla.

🔭 Комета Lemmon сегодня утром на снимке Брэя Фоллса ✨

A black and white photographic figure of the skull of the pilot whale convergent beluga Denebola brachycephala. The snout is shorter than a modern beluga, and the facial plane is more concave.

Did you know that we used to have warm water beluga whales? This is the pilot whale-convergent beluga Denebola brachycephala from ~8 million year old rocks (Almejas Fm.) of Isla Cedros just off Baja California. Read more about white whale evolution here: coastalpaleo.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-...

A partial skull of a small baleen whale; it is about a meter long, light brown in color, with a long blowhole and a narrow, pyramidal braincase with high muscle attachment crests and a large eye socket. It's sitting on a white sheet with scale bars next to it.

#fossilfriday The beautiful skull of the dwarf baleen whale Herpetocetus bramblei (Cetotheriidae) I discovered and excavated as an undergrad from the 5-6 myo Purisima Formation near Santa Cruz, California. Now in @ucmpberkeley.bsky.social collections!

At the Fordyce lab at Otago, we would do this with sheets of tyvek and illuminate it with LED lamps. It's important to be flexible with space and equipment to make an ad hoc studio when you study fossil whales! Usually, you bring the studio to the whale 🏋️

The paltry fossil record of narwhals (Monodon) and the evolutionary history of white whales Narwhals are certainly among the strangest and most immediately recognizable of all marine mammals, owing to their fantastic tusk. Narwhals ...

NEW blog post! The evolution and fossil record of narwhals and belugas - the white whales! Emphasis on the surprising fossil record of belugas and the evolution of the bizarre tusk in the weirdest modern cetacean. 🐬🧪🦖 #whaleontology Read it here: coastalpaleo.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-...

Went to LA comic con with @tetrameryx.bsky.social and @joshualudtke.bsky.social today. The funniest/most incredibly niche costume I saw was, in a star wars family costume, a lady dressed up as gender bent Dave Filoni, complete with the hat and everything

A photo of an adorable baby sea otter floating on its back and holding its paws together. Its face is brown rather than the white seen in old adults.

The skull of an adult sea otter, stained with echinochrome, a purple pigment found in purple sea urchins.

#seaotterawarenessweek Sea otters are some of the most famous modern marine mammals, and considered ecosystem engineers here on the Pacific coast. However, we know surprisingly little about their evolutionary history and fossil record. 🧵1/ coastalpaleo.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-...

Nerd stuff:
480 frames, stacked (~1.5 hours)
Seestar s50
Stacked in Siril, and processed in Pixinsight, with minor edits in Gimp

This nebula is sometimes called the “Eye of God,” or the “Eye of Sauron.” The star at the center of a planetary nebula was once a red giant, but is destined to become a white dwarf. This nebula is fairly large - almost 3 light years across, and is estimated to be about 10,600 years old.

The Helix Nebula is a planetary nebula around 655 light-years from Earth. A planetary nebula is a bit of a misnomer - it has nothing to do with planets, but instead is an expanding shell of ionized gas ejected from a red giant star at the end of their life.

a nebula that looks like an eyeball, with red, yellow, and blueish-green gasses.

NGC 7293 - The Helix Nebula
🔭 #astronomy #astro #astrophoto #astrophotography

14 years married, and over 20 years together - he still makes me laugh every day, and is the best friend anyone could ever ask for. I'm the luckiest girl in the world.
Happy lucky 14th wedding anniversary!
Love you to the end, nerd. @coastalpaleo.bsky.social

A couple of kayaks in crystal clear ocean water on the southern California coast; the water is a beautiful turquoise blue.

A pair of California sea lion pups playing next to me underwater, zipping around in circles at dizzying speed over a bed of seagrass.

Sarah's incredible birthday cake - a three layer chocolate cake with white frosting and chocolate ganache (sp) dripping down the sides, and a pair of candles shaped like the numbers 4 and 0.

Me and some other whaleontologists looking at a bunch of fossil earbones at a table like the weirdos we are

I spent the last day of my 30s and the first day of my 40s snorkeling with friends (with attached and removable fins), and had some of my closest friends and colleagues over to look at far too many whale specimens. @tetrameryx.bsky.social baked her most beautiful cake yet 😍

A man holding up an orange cat

An orange cat peering inside a toilet

A man with an orange cat in his lap

#gingercatappreciationday here's my orange son, Jonesy

“… after people expressed concern over his absence for 3 days.”
I mean, I wouldn’t say I was concerned

The Pleiades, open star cluster, painted with thick watercolour on paper. Style is inspired by The Starry Night - thick short dashed brushstrokes twirling around. Bright white stars with a dash of yellow; surrounding is dominated with bright blue colour which fades outward to black.

The Pleiades, open star cluster. Inspired by The Starry Night, and painted with watercolor on paper.

#SciArt #Astronomy #Watercolor #ArtYear

The skeleton of Max on display; the skull is enormous and has laterally facing tusks. The bones of the skeletons are mounted on a cutout shaped like the body outline of a live mastodon, and is about five meters tall and perhaps six meters long.

A large white to tan skull of a mastodon in a glass case. The eye sockets are small and located on the side of the skull; the tusk sockets form a large shovel-like platform on the rostrum, and the single retracted bony naris is present between the eyes. The tusks are placed on the ground around the skull.

A large white to tan skull of a mastodon in a glass case. The eye sockets are small and located on the side of the skull; the tusk sockets form a large shovel-like platform on the rostrum, and the single retracted bony naris is present between the eyes. The tusks are placed on the ground around the skull.

#fossilfriday Max Mastodon on display at Western Science Center - the holotype skull and partial skeleton of the Pacific mastodon, Mammut pacificus - the recently named species of mastodon unique to the Pacific coast.

Paleontological Research Tips III: a complete idiot's guide to taking decent specimen photographs Other posts in this series: Paleontological Research Tips I: field notes for amateurs and professionals alike Paleontological Research...

If you've ever struggled to take good photographs of fossils (or other reasonably stationary natural history objects), here's a beginner's guide to scientific fossil photography I wrote a while ago (and should probably update). coastalpaleo.blogspot.com/2016/02/pale...

A watercolor painting of a toothed baleen whale skull in side view. The jaws are closed, and the skull has a rather large eye socket; the nose is still quite far out on the snout. There are a series of mostly conical teeth that interlock like a crocodile.

New #watercolor - the skull that launched a thousand papers - Aetiocetus weltoni, the ~25 myo toothed baleen whale that likely had teeth and baleen - from the Oligocene of Oregon. I started this last winter and only finally finished it yesterday. 🐡 🦖🐬 #sciart #whaleontology #whalewednesday #art

Life restoration of Phiomicetus anubis, a walking whale, going after a sawfish.

The original skull, mandible, and skeleton of Phiomicetus anubis, a walking whale from the Eocene of Egypt.

Phiomicetus anubis turns 4 today! So proud of the little guy 🥹P. anubis is a 42-43 million year old "walking whale" from the Fayum desert of Egypt. #whaleontology 🧪🦖

A soft coral consisting of many finger-like branches; the branches are red and studded with golden yellow polyps.

Only got one good shot of this gorgonian soft coral (California golden gorgonian, Muricea californica) - it was at an awkward depth, too deep to just stick my arm down while floating, but too shallow to dive). But, what a beautiful coral! A relative of fan corals and sea whips. 🦀🦑

Nerd stuff:

372 x 30 lights (roughly 2 hours)
20 of each calibration frame
gain: 106
camera cooled to -10c
zwoASI2600MC-AIR
TPO 8" f/8 Ritchey-Chretien Astrograph Telescope
ZWO AM5N
Stacked in Siril, and processed in Pixinsight, with minor edits in Gimp

Shit happens, but I was cranky enough about it that I took over a week to even look at my data and process it 😂 Luckily, there was so little light pollution that 2 hours still gave me decent results!