Jack Stack

Not in academia but Cam James on YouTube does extremely thorough and well-researched videos on scams and grifting at all levels in the US.

Tiny branching fossil on a brachiopod

This kind of thing

Encrusting animals from a bunch of Devonian brachiopods from Michigan, have a student working on them now.

My brachiopod project is now largely a bryozoan and coral project. Exciting times!

@reallyoldfish.bsky.social

Excellent can’t wait to read!

Looking at articles on Zookeys and Zootaxa is far too much fun. I can’t get enough of all the awesome taxonomy that’s being done around the world. So much amazing work!

Cover of the journal Nature, featuring the head of a large fish with its mouth open. A smaller fish is swimming into its mouth. The cover reads "Caught in Time: Early fossils shed light on the origins of bony fish."

Osteichthyans--the bony fishes--are by far the most diverse group of living jawed vertebrates. Two papers out today in @nature.com feature remarkable new Chinese fossils that paint a picture of substantial morphological diversity among stem osteichthyans.

My notebook

This is my artificial intelligence writing assistant, it provides work-flow enhancement and doubles as a fly swatter. I write much more efficiently with it! I’d like a 50 billion dollar evaluation please.

This is correct

He's perfect to me (from Moy-Thomas and Bradley Dyne (1938).

Most normal Permian animal

Paper looks very interesting but this is the most terrifying figure I have ever seen.

🐊 Fish (Lent)

Blank white wall

Wilson Fisk looking at a wall

Enjoying the decor in my office

Going to print this out and put it above my desk

This is what the geneticists in my department see when they read my papers.

Now the aim is to get grants to fund the basic equipment needed to catalog specimens. Hopefully I can get that done, otherwise I’ll be funding it out of pocket.

The road is tough. Doing fossil taxonomy has required a lot of luck and frankly having my parent’s support when grants didn’t come through. If we want more taxonomy and taxonomists, we need to fund it. It’s an absolutely essential 21st century science, but it’s not funded like it.

Couldn’t agree more. Just today had a student start learning about Devonian brachiopods and the tiny animals that grew on them (corals, bryozoans, and worm-like things that haven’t been identified at the phylum level). They are excited to learn!

Don’t forget him

Bead boxes and pusheen stickers

I’m ready to store some fossils! Brachiopods for now, hoping to get in the field soon and collect more fishes (and brachiopods too of course). And some office decorations @pusheen.bsky.social

Tire rim that’s destroyed

Thank you to the city of Laurel for having a giant pothole in the middle of the road!

Love figtree excited to try this new tool

This site also has a palaeoniscoid somehow. They really did live forever

Fossil coral have always been a favorite of mine. The Devonian was a time of strange and wonderful corals of all shapes and sizes. In Michigan, I’ve found horn corals and colonies as big as basketballs. There are also tiny encrusting corals the size of a grain of rice. Awesome fossil!

What kind of lemon is this?

Looks perfect to me

Government enforcement of an individual's gene-to-phenotype mapping on the basis of normative and essentialist arguments is eugenics. If you don't see how dangerous that is you know nothing about biology.

Ill have to take some photos and get your opinion, I have a bunch of brachiopods from the same site in Michigan (Devonian) that have a variety of encrusters and even some bore holes.