Emily Mitchell

The outline of a box (aquarium) solely illuminated by small glowing dots produced by hundreds of tiny crustaceans called ostracods.

angry ostracods are still small inspirations

✨ A study in nature.com from our Faculty at @unikarlova.cuni.cz reveals Solarion arienae, a rare #protist forming a newly identified eukaryotic supersroup Disparia. A unique window into early #eukaryotic cell #evolution. 🌍🔬👏

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Save Geology at the University of Leicester Can you spare a minute to help this campaign?

The geology department at the University of Leicester, where myself and countless others did our palaeontology PhDs, is at serious risk of closure

Please show your support by signing the below!

c.org/KtYyZB8dHk

Four shots of a baby giant pacific octopus bouncing around

It’s baby octopus season 🐙🦑

Saw this little guy last night with the Salish Sea School in Anacortes, WA as part of their free community dock walk I volunteer as an interpreter for.

We can tell it is a giant pacific octopus from the single line of chromatophores on each arm.

#Fractofusus is the most common organism at many of the #Ediacaran fossil sites in #Newfoundland, and it's also one of the best preserved. Here we can see the complex branching they possessed, preserved in exquisite detail.

#FossilFriday #FractofususFriday

NEW pub in @science.org 🥳

Is it sponges (panels A & B) or comb jellies (C & D) that root the animal tree of life?

For over 15 years, #phylogenomic studies have been divided.

We provide new evidence suggesting that...

🔗: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

a shrimp-like aquatic animal with rows of triangular flippers on both sides, a shrimy tail, and an elephant trunk at the front. it's illustrated with five eyes but that bit is speculative.

Everyone's auroraposting but my tropical sky is severely lacking any, so here's Utaurora comosa from Cambrian Utah. #Art #SciArt

A pink, spiky-looking plant with several appendages.

Carnivorous plants, like this *very* pink Pink Sundew (Drosera capillaris), thrive where few other plants can survive — acidic, sandy, and nutrient-deficient bogs and grasslands.

📷 stevemaldonadosilvestrini on iNaturalist
📍 Puerto Rico
🔗: www.inaturalist.org/observations...
#ObservationOfTheDay

I designed a horseshoe crab sweater and published it on Ravelry on National horseshoe crab day! If you ever thought to yourself “man, I really want a hand knit sweater with horseshoe crabs on it” boy do I have great news for ya

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

Mamdani campaign sticker meme, with blue background and two lines of text with yellow letters highlighted by red, saying (top line) TRACE FOSSILS (bottom line) The REAL FOSSIL RECORD

Hey paleo-friends: Did I do this right?

Housing The Homeless Saves Money--Here's The Research That Proves It The best way to stop homelessness is mindbogglingly simple: Give them homes.

“Providing the homeless with a place to live may seem like a high cost for taxpayers. But the alternative, it turns out, is more costly, new research shows. Subsidized accommodation could actually be a bargain for the public, in purely economic terms.” Via @fastcompany

YouTube video by Monterey Bay Aquarium 🪼Happy World Jellyfish Day! #shorts

🪼Happy World Jellyfish Day!

These brainless, boneless, and bloodless beauties play an important role in our ocean ecosystems.

youtube.com/shorts/KRi9y...

Ball sponge with brittle stars perched on branches which bear round balls on tips

white starfish with elongate arms feeding on sponge-stalked with balls on tips branching off

Here's a shot from #Okeanos in 2019 off MIami, tropical Atlantic showing a carnivorous sponge Chondrocladia being devoured by Henricia antillarum! Same kind of sponge recently discovered by @oceancensus.bsky.social recent expedition! In the #deepsea there's always someone eating someone!

A bivariate map showing loss of historical climate / emergence of novel climate, alongside a legend -- the legend is rotated 45 degrees to show the increase of change on the y axis

Rough draft, obviously, but I think I like this approach to bivariate legends.

You might’ve heard the news: SpaceX just passed 10,000 Starlink satellites launched. And that number is already old news, as there’s now a new Starlink batch launched every other day. Here’s what that looks like in a short animation of Comet A6 Lemmon courtesy of Michael Jaeger:

An accumulation of discarded mucous houses of Oikopleura vanhoeffeni on the Arctic seafloor.

🧪🦤🌐
Rare jelly-falls from appendicularians observed in an Arctic fjord! A hidden link between gelatinous plankton and the carbon cycle?
bit.ly/meps_771_71

A sponge
#gili #giliislands #lombok #diving #scuba #trawangan #diveandstay #giliair #fish #ocean #sealife #marinelife #padi #reef #sponge

Image 1 is a pretty empty image of the Antarctic Sea floor. There's visibly a few large starfish in bright pink.

In the annotated version of image 1, there's around 15 creatures labelled, including some tiny shells scattered across the floor.

Supercharged seafloor spotting! 🐚

Our AI and science teams have been using machine learning to label surveys of the Antarctic seafloor. It's dramatically sped them up from <8 hours per photo, to a few seconds.

This one looks like a quick job. But stay with us as we up the difficulty...

🧵 1/4

The Dawn of animal life: quantifying the origination animal mobility In this contribution, Emily Mitchell considers how animals first started to move.

How animals first started to move? Some insights by @egmitchell.bsky.social (@camzoology.bsky.social) using fossil records.
valuepast.hypotheses.org/4954

Vacancies Explore the wealth of content available within The Linnean Society of London's website.

We're #hiring! Passionate about natural history and historical collections? Here at the Linnean Society, the world’s oldest active society devoted to natural history, we're looking for an Assistant Archivist to support our Collections team.

Closing date: 9 Nov 2025
Find out more:

The Ice Age Has Nothing on ‘Snowball Earth’

The Ice Age Has Nothing on ‘Snowball Earth’ @huwiceandstuff.bsky.social @egmitchell.bsky.social #evolutionsoup #evolution #iceage #science #fossils
👇🏿👇🏽
is.gd/b7AKgS

We're excited to share with everyone a preprint of our manuscript that resolves the cellular origins of the symbiosome in cnidarian-algal symbiosis through proteomics of the symbiosome, RNAi, and CRISPR/Cas9 experiments. ⬇️
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Read on below!

1/12 🧵

A photo of an olive green dad cap with two embroidered brown leafcutter ants holding leaves. It is photographed on top of a rock.

A photo of an olive green dad cap with two embroidered brown leafcutter ants holding leaves, but photographed from a different angle. It is photographed on top of a rock.

Unfortunately it looks like we won’t be hitting the preorder minimum for these hats unless we get some more orders!

So if you’re interested in a leafcutter ant hat or are considering holiday gifts, please preorder! 🐜🌿

Available below ⬇️

Happy Ctenophore Day!
These glowing ocean drifters look like jellyfish but aren’t! They’re comb jellies, shimmering creatures that light up the sea with rows of beating cilia 💙🌈
Which species can you identify? 👀 Most are raised in @pawelburkhardt.bsky.social lab
#CtenophoreDay #CombJelly #Ctenophore

It hurt when I crashed my bike into a pothole – and it taught me the true price of austerity | George Monbiot Fixing that hole could have cost under £100; the cost of not doing so is limitless. My prang highlights the neoliberal folly of false economies, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Keeping people in poverty is an expensive luxury.
My column on the false economies of austerity, which costs us all a fortune. Despite the government's claims, austerity continues under Labour. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

(solemnly) You've had mail.

Who's got unfused parietals and probably wasn't a stem snake? This guy.

Nudibranchs as pictured by a Japanese illustrator named Kumataro Ito, artist for the USS Albatross’ Philippine Expedition, 1907–10. More of his stunning images here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/k...

✨NEW INTERVIEW✨
EDIACARAN ECHOES - Tracing Evolution Across the Cosmos ~ DR EMILY MITCHELL @egmitchell.bsky.social @huwiceandstuff.bsky.social #evolutionsoup #evolution #ediacaran #science #fossils
👇🏿👇🏽
youtu.be/Rr_ojpUDj0c