Dr Susannah Lydon

YouTube video by Paleocueva Lacev Expedición Cretácica I - Dia 3

Day 3, people! From the field, looking for dinosaurs!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWC4...

A big log sitting on concrete with a rock wall behind it and a scale pencil on top of it. The log is blue and green!

A log, petrified with malachite + azurite. University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), 2012. ⚒️

Mapping Cave Art With A Cellphone Researchers in Spain used Apple iPhone’s built-in LiDAR sensor to create a 3D map of a cave with hundreds of prehistoric cave paintings.

Did you know that recent model iPhone Pros have a LiDAR sensor? You can use it to measure distances, and scientists in Spain used it to recreate a digital version of a cave filled with ancient cave art. 🧪 #scicomm www.forbes.com/sites/evaams...

We cover a lot of ground in this one: the ethics of publishing on Myanmar amber, article retraction, and whether Rob has any credibility. It's a good one. Give it a listen 👇

Picture of bacon sandwich with HP Brown Sauce. The distinctive flavour of brown sauce is from tamarind. Which plant family is tamarind from? Five choices: Fabaceae, Polygonaceae, Rosaceae, Apiaceae, Brassicaceae. A question from a past Botanical University Challenge competition.

🌱🌾🌍🌺🌳🌿🌲🥕🥦 Here's a past Botanical University Challenge question: The distinctive flavour of brown sauce is from tamarind. Which plant family is tamarind from? Five choices: Fabaceae, Polygonaceae, Rosaceae, Apiaceae, Brassicaceae. #BUC2025

A tardigrade moving around a volvox algae colony | 2025 Small World in Motion Competition Penny Fenton - A tardigrade moving around a volvox algae colony

🔬🦠🧫🧪 #MicroSky
This is the most fantatic video I've ever seen: a Tardigrade strolling on a Volvox by Penny Fenton #NikonSmallWorld #DarkField
www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/20...

How did cave artists get a brand new pigment? The discovery of traces of a blue pigment on a stone shaped into a shallow dish at a Palaeolithic site in Germany is quite a find

Because there's so much awful stuff to write about, I decided to write my latest column for @thenewworldmag.bsky.social about something interesting and removed from all that: the discovery of a blue pigment in a Neolithic artefact.
www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...

Sudden urge to pitch an event called 'STOP BEING A FANNY ABOUT INSECTS' to a major festival. 'Jules Howard and special guest tell the audience to stop being fannies about wasps and flies and bloody well just replant their front driveway spaces to make a home for earwigs'. Too much? Yes. Yes it is.

How fucking embarrassing is it for the entire political establishment that they're being outflanked on the left by MICHAEL FUCKING HESSELTINE

If people can write detailed text prompts for AI image generators then they can bloody well write alt text.

How and why plants came to smell green: the origins, biosynthesis, and roles of green leaf volatiles Rapidly released from damaged cells, green leaf volatiles exemplify an evolutionary adaptation conserved across terrestrial plants, serving as essential de

Interesting review in JXB:
How and why plants came to smell green: the origins, biosynthesis, and roles of green leaf volatiles
#plantscience
academic.oup.com/jxb/advance-...

One of Mud Lake’s forested shores. An autumnal shoreline at sunset. The landscape and sky doubly beautiful in the smooth mirror of the quiet lake.

Muttaburrasaurus munching on some leafs
Water color and colored pencil on board
11.8″ x 17.7″ (30 x 45 cm)

www.esthervanhulsen.com

#paleoart #paleoillustration #naturalhistoryillustration #naturalhistoryart #dinosaurart #animalart

Egg clutch sampled for chronological studies. Credit: Dr. Bi Zhao

Part of great skull burial at Ofnet, Bavaria. Copied from Hugo Obermaier, Fossil man in Spain, Newhaven, 1924, figure 143, page 338. (After F.R. Schmidt). Mesolithic level. General Collections Keywords: disposal of the dead; pre-historic; Archaeology; funerary techniques

#UnrelatedPicsWednesday !

Left : 28 late Cretaceaous dinosaur eggs from China, deposited 85 million years ago

Right : 27 Mesolithic skulls from the "Skull nest" of the Ofnet Cave in Germany

The genus existed until the Miocene, but I chose the Late Cretaceous Sequoites dakotensis so I could include an enantiornithine bird. The juvenile avialan is begging for food from an unseen parent perched atop the conifer branch with a cone and speculative leaves below it. The scene is overcast with fine rain.

#Paleoctober2025 day 7 paleoart sketch of the extinct conifer Sequoites.

#Paleoctober #Paleoart #Sequoites #Enantiornithes

#plants #botany #gardening #art 🌱

Dryopteris filix-mas syn. Aspidium - Male/Basket/Shield Fern.

I haven't paid much attention to ferns in the past. Here's a green, graceful example common to the N. Hemisphere. Likes the damp, shady places that need some life.

RHS:
www.rhs.org.uk/plants/11446...

Brown pencil drawing of a lady in fine robes and a headscarf walking a feathered Velociraptor on a leash.

'Princess Joveta sends her grateful thanks to her friend the great Khan for his kind gift of her new pet Velociraptor, with whom she is delighted. Isambart now responds to his name, is taking well to training, and bids fair to becoming a very fine hunter.'

A tour poster for my last remaining seven dates of my Autumn tour.

I'm onto the second half of the tour now, 7 dates remaining from Bonnie Scotland to the Big Smoke. Quite a few have sold out, but there are still tickets available for Cambridge tomorrow, and Glasgow and Edinburgh next week.
warringtonruncorn.com/live

feels like yet again time to mention that the *videogames* industry (that's a creative industry, which people do creative degrees in) brings in more than twice the amount to the British economy as the fishing and steel industries *combined*

stylised painting, long thin trees reaching up to the sky

Sergey Fyodorovich Podmarev.

I just realized that the Portland Antifascist Frog has singlehandedly reclaimed amphibians from the “alt right”. Yet another way he is a Great American.

This is so Richard Scarry

Night photo of three, salverform, white flower with exserted stamens. Photo by Scott Zona CCBYNC2.

Here’s yet another kind of pollination in Ipomoea: pollination by hawkmoths. This is I. alba, a fragrant, night-blooming species with a long, narrow corolla tube. #teammoth #Sphingidae #Convolvulaceae #Botany 🌾🧪🌱

Photo of leafless branches bearing large, pale yellow, goblet-shaped magnolia flowers. Photo by Scott Zona CCBYNC2.

Magnolias are much used as ornamental, flowering trees. I like the deciduous, yellow-flowered cultivars very much, even though their flowering period is brief. This is ‘Butterflies’, a cultivar of an interspecific cross. #Magnoliaceae #Botany 🌾🧪🌱

Here's the relevant chart from the above report. It's rare to see such a clear, consistent slope in any social trend. That segregation is decreasing is perhaps the best evidence, least controversial social fact of modern Britain

I know statistics are poorly understood and are misused. But facts matter

Between the 1991, 2001, 2011 and 2021 Census *every* ethnic group in the UK has become *less* geographically segregated and *all* groups, majority and minorities, are more likely to interact with people not like them

A small ammonite fossil embedded in shale

No home is complete without fossils

Get on this, watch Atomic Shakespeare, Big Man on Mulberry Street, The Lady in the Iron Mask, The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice or any number of other episodes (avoid the love-triangle episodes, for the love of god) and fall in love with one of the greatest shows ever to do it. Whatever "it" is.

Can’t decide what to buy on Prime Day?

Try: absolutely nothing, and then go support indie bookstores instead 📚

Someone in a frog costume facing down a line of police in riot gear

George Orwell’s Animal Crossing