Benjamin Gill

‘Every Single Dollar Mattered’: Donations Save Museum of the Earth From Foreclosure Just days before a year-end foreclosure deadline, the Museum of the Earth has paid off its mortgage following a wide fundraising campaign that rescued the Ithaca area landmark.

ACTUAL GOOD NEWS EVERYONE: The Paleontological Research Institution and the Museum of the Earth have made it through the crisis!

Thanks to everyone who shared or donated-every donation mattered! Please share the good news just as widely!⚒️🧪🦑 Together we did #savePRI

www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/...

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Currently doing my financial conflict of interest training for work and boy it hits different given the state of things in the US today.

Not unhappy about this...

Boxing up the NSF at Eisenhower Av for the forced relocation. Boxes have “Details Matter” signage.

NSF

- Forced reorg

- POs down ~ 40% (DRP, most rotators not renewed, retirements)

- Forced move (and we have to pack and clean) to a building with no furniture, little to no conference space for panels, inadequate 🛜, …)

I personally love the boxes they gave us for packing.
“Details matter” 🙃

Chart comparing the number of new grants awarded by the NSF in 2025 vs. previous years.

Chart comparing the funding awarded by the NSF in 2025 vs. previous years.

This year, the NSF funded 35% fewer grants in geoscience, with 25% less money. Meanwhile, the Office of the Director spent almost three times as much money as in a regular year.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Fifteen Years

i’m not crying you’re crying

xkcd: Fifteen Years

cross-bedded sandstone of the Pennsylvanian (late Carboniferous) New River Formation along Castle Rock trail (New River Gorge National River)

the New River Gorge at the Grandview overlook (West Virginia)

field trip this weekend for my Sedimentary Basins course –– we went from earliest Cambrian rift basin to Cambro-Ordovician passive margin to the three main foreland-basin phases of the rest of the Paleozoic (>240 Myr of history in two days 😅) ⚒️

Its a conference paper, so I don't know. If it has, it was by other creation "scientists".

I guess I'm lucky to have been sheltered enough to just notice this.

They are all self citations or other creationist refs... for better or worse.

Google Scholar entry for a young Earth creationist paper entitled "North American Precambrian Geology: A Proposed Young Earth Biblical Model"

Oh no! Google Scholar is indexing young Earth creationist references?!

I'm not a lawyer but this seems like its a violation of the Article I, Section 9, Clause 3 of the constitution. It would be an ex post facto law that retrospectively changes the legal consequences of action that happened before the enactment of the law.

constitution.congress.gov/browse/artic...

Well this would fuck me and my lab over- I wasn't entirely sure because, like many scientists, I collaborate widely and may not even know all of my coauthors (let alone their nationality) but I'm 99% sure it would make me ineligible for federal funding.

This has gotten surprisingly little attention — it's not even on the front page of @science.org right now — but it's really hard to describe what the SAFE Research Act would do to US science and scientists without sounding insane

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

a very large proportion of american scientists have worked with chinese scientists at some point in the last five years

Well if this actually happens, I'm hosed.

In the past five years papers I've co-authored at least 10 papers with Chinese collaborators and I've advised a Chinese Ph.D. student. I also currently have project that has a cooperative agreement between the Chinese science foundation and the NSF.

I counted 50.

They are really planning to go through with these cuts at Nebraska, despite recommendations not to. Unbelievable.

If you want to hire highly qualified, very successful earth and atmospheric sciences faculty in teaching and research, quite a few are probably looking for jobs for next year.

The vivid colours of the gemstone ammolite (Placenticeras meeki), perfectly preserved in its original form. Credit: Hiroaki Imai.

A paper in Scientific Reports presents the origins of vivid colours within the gemstone ammolite — a rare type of brightly coloured fossilised ammonite shell. go.nature.com/48OT5DX #Paleosky ⚒️ 🧪

i don’t know how to cross-post this from FB but this is absolutely heartbreaking. The age of scientific ocean discovery we were brought up in is gone & will never come back. I can’t.

I tend to think you are right based on the cross sections showing the septa... also not a coral expert.

I recant, based on the scale quote below they are probably too big to be Syringoporoids.

Close-up photo of many parallel cylindrical tubes, showing internal subdivisions of both radial septae and tube-orthogonal tabulae.

Paleontologists - are these tabulate corals? ⚒️

Yes, I believe its a Syringoporoid.

Doing research has to come with an epistemological humility that accepts you don't already know everything & understands that some things are going to be uncomfortably ambiguous. The 'mainstream' consensus on any issue won't be perfect, but you aren't going to overturn it with 5 min with ChatGPT.

⚒️ The Proterozoic Earth had radically different ocean and atmospheric chemistry, was ruled by bacterial mats, and was possibly being shaped by not-plate-tectonics, or at least different-plate-tectonics.

Calling it boring is such a depressing failure of the imagination.

“That name, man,” Riedman says of the boring billion. “We’ve got to kill it. Kill it with fire.”

Gave me a smile to see they interviewed you about your work too.