Richard Fallon

Making Science History – Penn Press The history of science from 1945 to 2020, told from the perspective of Arnold Thackray, a pioneering expert in the fieldIn this fascinating personal account ...

Is anyone keen to review Arnold Thackray's book Making Science History: A Personal Perspective from Alamogordo to AI (www.pennpress.org/978160618036...). Contact us at bslsreviews@gmail.com if so.

Yes this one's very tasteful

Specimen A18197 at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences: the graptolite Trigonograptus, glued to a blue tablet with labels indicatating publications in which it's been illustrated.

Next month, at the 2026 meeting of the @thebsls.bsky.social at the @unistrathclyde.bsky.social, I'll be talking about what the heck literary scholars can, might, or should be doing with natural history collections.

grainy black and white photo. Three naval reserve lads atop the Hylaeosaurus

From a letter in COUNTRY LIFE magazine, 13/02/1915:

“SIr, The saying that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy“ appears to have been taken seriously to heart by the lads of the Naval Brigade, now in training at the Crystal Palace..

1/2

(the Palace was closed to the public during WW1)

Cover of Harold W. Clark, Fossils, Flood, and Fire (1968). Painting of a sauropod and tyrannosaurs fleeing the Flood, while a volcano erupts in the background.

I've not seen many artistic representations of dinosaurs trying to escape the Genesis Deluge, or rather not many that weren't produced very, very recently. The image below is from an ebay auction (shorturl.at/Tg1TH). Harold W. Clark, Fossils, Flood, and Fire (1968). Watch out behind you, T. rex!

diagram showing how a film set might simulate an underwater view, with the arrangement (from left to right) of a film camera, an aquarium, a woman dressed as a mermaid, and three sheets

my article on Georges Méliès and aquariums—the first thing published from my dissertation—is now out open access at @jcmsjournal.bsky.social!!

read on to see how fairy tale grottoes, Jules Verne's science fiction, and water infrastructure are all connected!!!

quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/i...

Writing for Life 2026 - Wollaton Hall Tuesday 10th March 2026

Aspiring writers! The folk at Wollaton Hall (aka Batman’s house) are running an event for young people hoping for a career in writing

I’ll be there to talk history & non-fiction, alongside brilliant children's authors, poets, & novelists
🗓️ 10 March, 4–7pm wollatonhall.org.uk/writing-for-...

The frontispiece to Ethel Skeat's textbook The Principles of Geography, Physical & Human (1923). Not sure if school geography textbooks still have frontispieces, but, if they do, they probably don't depict Yggdrasil, Nidhögg, 'the little squirrel Ratatösk', 'the great Midgard serpent', etc.

A colourful Postmodern building with brick patterns, rounded columns, and palm trees.

Cambridge isn't a city known for its PoMo exuberance but I always admire this sunny delivery centre on Tennis Court Road.

Books Available to review for H-Environment Books Available for Review for H-Environment Below are the books currently available for review for H-Environment. Interested in reviewing one? Please email me at dmccahey@uci.edu. If we haven’t met,...

Reviewing a book is one of the best and most fun service opportunities available! Check out the awesome books available from H-Environment! #envhist #envhum #envtech #conservation #sustainability #envjustice #ecocrit #envphil #plantstudies #animalstudies #nature
docs.google.com/document/d/1...

NEW EPISODE: 'A Pastoral Horror' (1890). A Tyrolean village is terrorised by a serial killer, armed with an alpine pickaxe... Chat about: early crime fiction; Jack the Ripper; Feldkirch; werewolves and cuckoo clocks! bit.ly/DODoyle; bit.ly/DOD72sn; #ArthurConanDoyle

Terrible Lizards: S12E02 Writing with Dinosaurs  This is available to watch on youtube here: Support the podcast (keep it advert free) and get exclusive content: We have talked plenty about dinosaurs in pop culture, including in movies, but ...

If you need Saturday listening material, check out my chat with @davehone.bsky.social and Iszi Lawrence on the latest Terrible Lizards podcast. Two medical doctors, two twentieth-century dinosaur novels. Whoever wins, we lose: terriblelizards.libsyn.com/tls12e02-1

An historic black and white illustration of a paper nautilus floating on the ocean. There are boats, a city and hills in the background.

🎉 Huge news for BHL: The Field Museum is taking over the hosting of BHL’s website, servers & infrastructure, ensuring long-term stability and access for its 63+ million pages of open biodiversity literature. Learn more:
blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2026/02/tran...
#BHLTransition #ILoveBHL 🌍 📚 🧪

Painting of a long-necked dinosaur-like sea monster rearing up on its hind legs, to make itself the same height as the top of the lighthouse. It is attacking the lighthouse which is crumbling and being destroyed.

"The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound."

Ray Bradbury, 'The Foghorn' #BookologyThursday

🎨 by Zdeněk Burian

Dictyonema, retouched photograph by O. M. B. Bulman. Detail from part II of A Monograph of British Dendroid Graptolites (1928). #FossilFriday

Cost of living: Students praise 'essential' food bank service Queen's University Belfast says there were more than 10,500 visits by students to its food bank in the students' union.

Shocking. When I was an undergrad around 20 years ago, a decent summer job & the maintenance loan saw me (carefully) thru a whole year in a provincial city. The cost of living is now so insane that hundreds, maybe thousands, of students in Belfast are using food banks. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

In an Age of Science, Tennyson Grappled with an Unsettling New World His poetry reckoned with the immensities of reality, time, and grief, confronting a world upended by new truths about the earth and the heavens.

Always a joy to find a piece by Kathryn Schulz in the latest New Yorker. This article (nay, meditation) on Richard Holmes’ new biography of Tennyson is quite wonderful. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

That would have been in the sequel

Like Jurassic Park (Crichton)? Like The Lost World (Doyle)? Like The Lost World (Crichton)? Then this is the podcast for you. Although people who said yes to the last question may be thinner on the ground.

Yes, it looks pretty bumbling

'Un mondo perduto': a sauropod dinosaur is seconds away from crashing into the water when Tower Bridge snaps.

This 1928 Italian cover for The Lost World ... I like it.

Close-up of red and black model of a theropod dinosaur.

Residents of Kent! Does anyone know if this guy is still on display in Maidstone Museum? Or has he long since departed?

Diorama behind glass of the therocephalian carnivore Scymnosaurus.

I've been reminded about this very impressive online resource: Iziko Museum's loving recreation of its 1959 Boonstra Diorama exhibition on the prehistoric life of the Karoo. (www.iziko.org.za/exhibitions/...)

The Piltdown forgery extended to other fossils supposedly from the site (but probably planted) that Dawson stained brown. My personal favourites being 'The Piltdown Clams'! Two specimens of Upper Cretaceous inoceramid bivalve derived from the #Chalk.

The model is dark brown or black in colour and although plaster, it looks like metal. It is of a living Iguanodon, not a skeleton/fossil.

Plaster model of Iguanodon - by Vernon Edwards. The model dates from the 1940s and is part of our current dinosaur exhibition in the upstairs corridor.
#Bexhill #Dinosaur

"Beautiful Shells For Bexhill Museum.
These specimens were exhibited at Miss Marsden's residence on Wednesday. When she received the members of the Bexhill Commercial Association and other local gentlemen." Bexhill Observer 22.2.1913. #Bexhill #Sussex #Museum #KateMarsden #Shell #History #1910s

Been attempting to track down the #Arctic natural #history specimens donated to the Whitby #Museum by William Scoresby Jr using old catalogues and photos. I've finally found a photo of his long-lost "sea-horse heads"! I've never seen walrus stuffed in this way. Also note the Ichthyosaur at the back!

A letter from Humphrey Gilbert-Carter to Harry Richardson Creswick, 3 May 1927, containing a pressed plant with yellow flowers.

A letter from Humphrey Gilbert-Carter to Harry Richardson Creswick, 3 May 1927, containing a pressed plant, on top of a 15th-century Bible.

The smell of old books. ‘Quite a small piece of Fenugreek would make your Bible smell like a ripe cheese.’

Humphrey Gilbert-Carter, Director of @cubotanicgarden.bsky.social to Harry Creswick @theul.bsky.social, identifying a plant in a 15th-century Bible as Helichrysum stoechas. Inc.1.A.7.2[860]

'Still-life with coffee pot.' (1914) Like the work of his close friend and fellow Camden Town Group member Charles Ginner, many of Malcolm Drummond’s paintings show his interest in structure and form.

common term, earwig, is derived from the Old English ēare, which means 'ear', and wicga, which means 'insect', or literally, 'beetle'.[2] Entomologists suggest that the origin of the name is a reference to the appearance of the hindwings, which are unique and distinctive among insects, and resemble a human ear when unfolded.[3][4] The name is more popularly thought to be related to the old wives' tale that earwigs burrowed into the brains of humans through the ear and laid their eggs there.[5] Earwigs are not known to purposefully climb into ear canals, but there has been at least one anecdotal report of earwigs being found in the ear.[6]

It's pretty pathetic that this is the best Wikipedia can do on cases of earwigs climbing into ears.