Dr Dave Hone

It's one of those things which 8a such an odd decision. Itmalesn9 sense and could have easily been the more appropriate anurognathids shown properly.

It's not like it took till the 3rd act for it to come into play.

And it just doesn't look that real. The big moment of wonder where the palaeontologist gets to touch a real dinosaur is really obvious an actor with some CGI leg next to him. Thirty years of CG dinosaurs and when it's not dark or raining they look like CGI dinosaurs.

Finally saw Jurassic World Rebirth. Quite an improvement on the recent installments, though they still need work on the writing generally and boy the dino details don't get any more accurate. Long tailed Anurognathus, micro-Pteranodon, Quetzalcoatlus is an avian (and that head!) etc.

TLS11E07 Flappy Flap Bum Flaps Terrible Lizards · Episode

No, you called @davehone.bsky.social’s podcast episode about #pterosaur soft tissues flappy flap bum flaps. 😎 #terriblelizards open.spotify.com/episode/3wJE...

Facilitating green OA really didn't help the push. If REF was gold OA only, you'd see an instant shift in the approach (though probably mostly people asking for more grant funds to pay publishing fees....).

I hope not. I tell my students that I think we have a moral duty to communicate our science to the public. It doesn't mean everyone needs a podcast or to put out a press release for every paper, but fundamentally scientists should be communicating about their work to those who ultimately fund it.

The Daily Mail lead with a photo of triumphant Irish and Ghanaian heritage Lioness players + another anti-immigration story. What hypocritical graceless fuckwits.

Friends who've published with Hopkins, check out the below if you weren't already aware:

Fiddling with Javascript to change mentions of AI in news to a more accurate description

Yeah, dinosaurs were never popular with kids before he came along. Another brilliant line of evidence there.

That's a nice one too. Like the kind of cross hatching with the pale stripes.

Red, brown, or glass?

Garden Tiger If disturbed the moth displays its orange hindwings with blue-black spots and can produce a clear yellow fluid from two ducts just behind the head.The larvae can be seen from August to late the follow...

I've seen a few Jersey's but never a garden tiger, I think they are even prettier: butterfly-conservation.org/moths/garden...

Jersey Tiger caterpillar Another caterpillar at my moth trap this morning. This time it wasn’t in the trap but under it. This is the caterpillar of the Jersey Tiger – reasonable rare moth which is common in Sou…

Jersey tiger moth. Not very common but we see them occasionally. adriancolston.wordpress.com/2017/05/25/j...

I saw this bad boy (or girl) on Friday. :)

In theory, but you might get a permit to say 'things thing is common but that one is rare and it's for us' but the difference between the two might be something only a real expert could tell. And the areas of land could be vast and impossible to monitor. Practically I think this would be very hard.

It certainly doesn't help.

Can any GoPro (or equivalent) users recommend a starter set-up? Something with decent battery, anti-shake and ideally waterproof and with features like time lapse. Seeing stuff around £70-150 which is idea but a bewildering choice, so recommendations welcome.

And yes, palaeo has always gone hand in hand with commercial collecting and sales, but that hardly means it is a good thing or continue. Hunting doubtless contributed to early natural history museums and science, but we're not shooting elephants and tigers for research any more.

Yeah, she was selling stuff to the scientists!

But also people like Carnegie were building museums and donating skeletons and casts to collections, not just buying them for their office.

Yeah, and in plenty of other places too. And I those laws aren't changing any time soon, so it's wishful thinking that we could just stop the trade. That's why I think we need to work with owners and buyers and get them involved in the value of the science and not just the $ value of fossils.

I'd broadly agree. But while it's easy to say 'sharks teeth are super common and dinosaur skulls are super rare' there's a massive grey area. Who gets to decide what is and isn't valuable and how would it be monitored and assessed?

OK, but how? In the US at least, the fossils on private land are owned by the landowner. They can do what they want with them and are not going to hand them over to a museum if someone is willing to give then enormous sums of money instead.

And also just dinosaurs are de facto popular and have been for the best part of two centuries. Jurassic Park would hardly have been a hit if no one cared about dinosaurs.

Famously dinosaurs were unpopular before skeletons were auctioned for insane prices. Museums everywhere were shutting as no one wanted to look at Tyrannosaurs or Triceratops. So we should thank the billionaires for making them popular again by, err, buying them so they can't be on public display.

Why it’s not a problem that dinosaurs are sold for millions of dollars – art historian A ceratosaurus fossil has sold for US$30 million in New York, infuriating many dinosaur experts. Here’s why they ought to think again.

We need more nuanced commentary on the sale of fossils than we often get, but this take is awful. Selling fossils is fine as museums can always buy casts and dinosaurs become more prominent because of sales is missing the point so badly the shot went backwards: theconversation.com/why-its-not-...

And guess where new research was done to generate new ideas and technologies, and where other people were trained to go on and invent or develop stuff that could be sold?
Killing two birds with one stone is supposed to be a great achievement unless you shouldn't have actually killed either of them.

And I'm giving names to my socks.