Dr Caitlin Syme

Just got my new drivers license and the picture is so washed out I'm sure the DMV staff member must be dabbling in spirit photography.

Hearing about the Victorian meteorite everyone's hunting for inspired me to delve into the Queensland Museum collections and examine the Tenham Meteorite that lit up Queensland's skies in 1879. ☄️
Read more here → bit.ly/4fOJDlh

#QMKurilpa #QldMuseum #Meteorites #TenhamMeteorite #DinosUnearthed
🧪⚒️☄️

Had an awesome time at Chinchilla Fossil Finders this past weekend! The Queensland Museum put on an activity day where the community helped sieve for microfossils and learn about Pliocene megafauna. The local TV network covered it too ⚒️🦴
#palaeontology #fossils
www.facebook.com/share/v/1B3s...

Apollo 11 in Real Time A real-time interactive journey through the first landing on the Moon. Relive every moment as it occurred in 1969.

Tune in to the original #MoonDay by visiting apolloinrealtime.org/11/

OK…I know. This is a preprint. Not peer-reviewed/not the final version/all of that & etc. So, we shouldn’t be discussing any of the science or results at-large…

(/many)

alright i have my laptop, guess i'm livetweeting the dire wolf preprint.

so a quick reminder: this is not yet peer-reviewed, so there's some different expectations re: quality.

also let's be clear, i'm a hella biased reader, bc i don't trust the hype they're courting

YouTube video by La Brea Tar Pits and Museum Are Dire Wolves Alive Again? #TarPits #DireWolves #Paleontology #Shorts

🐾 Are #direwolves alive again?

Dr. Mairin Balisi (Augustyn Family Curator at @alfpaleo.bsky.social and Research Associate at the #TarPits) has studied dire wolves for over 15 years and published numerous papers. Listen as she shares insight about the Ice Age Angeleno.

youtube.com/shorts/8KAYl...

Two-fingered dinosaur used its enormous claws to eat leaves A dinosaur fossil discovered in Mongolia boasts the largest ever complete claw, but the herbivorous species only used it to grasp vegetation

A new therizinosaur just dropped! This group is already pretty bizarre, but Duonychus tsogtbaatari joins the two-fingered theropod club, with 2 giant claws instead of the usual 3, which seem to have been pretty dexterous for grasping plants!
🦖🧪⚒️
www.newscientist.com/article/2473...

YouTube video by Palaeocast Gaming Network IT'S FINALLY HERE! Real Palaeontologist Plays TWO POINT MUSEUM!

I managed to get my video done before cyclone Alfred hits - just a few hours until pandemonium in the city itself. Until then, enjoy my #FossilFriday review of Two Point Museum (as a palaeo who works at a museum!)

youtu.be/OaOG8LM_AU4?...

@twopointstudios.bsky.social
⚒️🧪🎮🦖

A weather map in showing wind speed and direction over Australia (with blue lines for slow wind and light green/yellow for fast wind) - a large green and yellow swirl indicating a cyclone can be seen on the east coast of Australia near Brisbane

Trying to focus on work and planning to film a video for the YouTube channel I’m part of, but Alfred is making me anxious:

Plot of time against relative size (of seeds and animals). Green area on left represents the Cretaceous. Light competition for saplings increased leading to the evolution of large seeds able to establish taller saplings before relying on photosynthesis for energy (orange curve). Feeding on large fruit/seeds opened the niche for large mammal evolution (blue curve). When animals reach a particular herbivore size (HS1), animal disturbance leads to decreased light competition driving a decrease in seed size. When megafauna disturbance decreased to a certain level, the herbivore size will show a local minimum (HS2) after which a dynamic equilibrium state with smaller fluctuations in seed size will establish in this model. http://phylopic.org: triceratops, elephant (CC0 1.0); shrew (Sarah Werning; CC BY 3.0); https://thenounproject.com: meteor (Alex Muravev), small, intermediate and large seed icons (Soetarman Atmodjo, ji-na seo and RoyyanWijaya, respectively), all CC BY-3.0.

A herd of the Jurassic sauropod dinosaur Camarasaurus walks through a mostly coniferous floodplain forest in what will one day be Utah. Such large dinosaurs transform the landscape with their massive footfalls and bodies, damaging trees and increasing light levels for the saplings on the forest floor. Image credit Victor O. Leshyk. http://www.victorleshyk.com/

Ecosystem engineers alter the evolution of seed size by impacting fertility and the understory light environment doi.org/10.1111/pala... @datadryad.bsky.social #FossilFriday

A watercolour drawing of a nautilus fossil. It is cream in colour.

A watercolour drawing of an ammonite, it is brown in colour.

A watercolour drawing of an ammonite, it is grey and cream in colour.

George B. Sowerby (1812-1884) produced these beautiful watercolour drawings of fossil remains from the Cheltenham area about 1840.

View all 148 watercolours via our #DigitisedCollections https://buff.ly/4aPzanv
#FossilFriday

#Palaeontology #SpecialCollections #Fossils

"...the collection kept growing... and the ideological shifts and internal divisions of the Revolution added to the overall confusion... as the debate about the correct methodology for the new museum rumbled on..."

So, not much has changed since 1793!

"...that serve only to satisfy idle curiosity. What it must be is an imposing school". The author then describes how the Louvre had "...ever-moving goalposts. There were financial and space constrictions - part of the Grande Galerie remained under reconstruction for quite some time (cont...)

A photo of a front cover of the book "The Curator's Egg: The evolution of the museum concept from the French Revolution to the present day" by Karsten Schubert

"The Curator's Egg" - a book I found in a second-hand bookshop the other day - has some beautiful insights into the everpresent problems faced by museums.
In 1793, Jean-Jaques David said of the Louvre, "The museum is not supposed to be a vain assemblage of frivolous luxury objects (cont...)

A 3D braincase of the early jawed vertebrate Palaeospondylus from Australia This paper describes a new Australian species of an enigmatic 400-million-year-old fossil vertebrate, Palaeospondylus, previously only known from Scotland.

I spent my #FossilFriday cataloguing Queensland's newest fossil species - Palaeospondylus australis!

Palaeospondylus had previously only been found in Scotland, so this new Early Devonian (late Emsian) species is a fascinating find!
academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-...
#palaeontology #fossils 🧪⚒️

A large, old book filled with pasted-in sheets with paintings of objects from Gessner's natural history collection. It is opened on a page with fossil insects.

Close-up of the centre of the page, with a section of nine pieces of amber - all having one or more tiny insects within.

A very close-up image of two of the amber pieces. Barely a few cm large, we can identify an ant in the upper piece, and a fly or a mosquito in the lower piece.

A favourite page of mine from Johs. Gessner's "Museum" for this #FossilFriday - pieces of amber with inclusions on the page with fossil insects from his collection. They look like you could pick them up off the page 💚(ZBZ NFF4, mid-1700s) #SciArt #EarlyModern #InverteFest

That’s a Otodus megalodon (or Megalodon, or giant ancient shark) tooth. Whoops indeed!

YouTube video by Palaeocast Gaming Network Real Palaeontologist Plays the SUPRISINGLY addictive CREATURES OF WAR

This #FossilFriday, watch the SUPRISINGLY addictive CREATURES OF WAR playthrough from the Palaeocast Gaming Channel!
I play as a very manly soldier dude with a deep voice sprinting at an ungodly speed around an island while being chased by dinosaurs. It's actually quite fun!
youtu.be/x0An8Tbf2gg

A piece of history: the first science journal

This is an absolutely fascinating and beautiful animation & summary of the findings from El Albani et al 2024 - Rapid volcanic ash entombment reveals the 3D anatomy of Cambrian trilobites 👇

I've updated this starter pack for all interested!

Now bursting with over 100 natural history museum related accounts 🎉🌱🦆🙌
go.bsky.app/NtdUnyF

MS Word is Using You to Train AI How to turn off AI-scraping from your Word documents

How to turn off MS Word scraping your writing to train its AI medium.com/illumination...

Like ‘old Twitter’: The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky After recent changes to Elon Musk’s X, a gradual migration turns into a stampede

Like ‘old Twitter’: The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky

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

For #FossilFriday, here’s something fun I found in the collection - GSQF13122, a little pyritised actinopterygian smack bang in the middle of a drill core sample through the Allaru Mudstone, from 615m underground! How lucky is that?

🧪⚒️

YouTube video by Palaeocast Gaming Network PALAEONTOLOGIST PLAYS: Still Wakes the Deep #1

Real palaeontologist and offshore oil rig worker Dave Marshall has just played Still Wakes the Deep - a horror game set on an oil rig…

Dave talks about what life is really like offshore and the important role that palaeontologists play in the safe extraction of oil and gas.

🧪 ⚒️ 🎮 #paleontology

Ooooh cool!

Fish/ Wet collection folks!

Where do you source your largest jars from (5-10g+)?

Please rt!