Jack Stack

I really thought this was ice cream for a second

Went to Harpers Ferry and only took pictures of spotted lanternflies. I think something may be wrong with me.

The actual birthplace of college football with another historic win. The pretenders at Rutgers have nothing on the red and the blue! @sickoscommittee.org

HURRAH, HURRAH PENN SYL VANIA, HURRAH FOR THE RED AND THE BLUE

Caught her red-handed. Now I know where they have been laying eggs on campus…

Peltopleurids are also neat for having one of the earliest gonopodium examples in a ray-finned fish. This is a modified anal fin in an inferred male individual, by Lombardo (1999).

More spotted lanternflies!

Literally me

I’m normal and can be trusted with plastic cubes

Student with an impressive first attempt at pinning a spotted lanternfly.

Carl Linnaeus in 1735:

Every child in America will have a share in Elonichthys

#SundayFishSketch 🐠🐟And the series is now complete! Here is a selection of 21 pycnodont fish, showing their diversity through time Species in the Alt text #paleoart

Love that some pycnodonts turn themselves into a single living sword

Went through the storage of my predecessor in zoology at Bowie State. I now have 1) a very nice cart, 2) hundreds of excellent specimens for teaching (including fossils!), and 3) TWO bone saws.

“Our investigation of a remote atoll in the area where Earhart’s plane vanished in 1937 has led us to believe she ended up assimilating into a colony of coconut crabs who welcomed her with open claws.” — Sheryl Thompkins, researcher

I published a re-description of a long nose fish on the same day the famous Spinosaurus re-description came out.

Sounds like charity but I would quickly go mad with power and devote an entire exhibit hall to my personal research gripes, beginning with Spinosaurus.

The Academy of Natural Sciences

Reminds me of the Jurassic Park book where you learn John Hammond is really good at getting people to give him money but does not understand the implications or danger of the technology he let loose on the world.

There is a misconception that adding more species to phylogenetic research increases resolution. The opposite is true, if the new taxa are incomplete or the character set is not suitable to resolve them. This is the “rogue taxon problem”, laid out here: ssbbulletin.org/article/id/4...

Fish paleontologist chiming in:

Porifera stays winning

Xiphactinus

This black widow is a serial killer of spotted lanternflies.

Think I am taking the macro camera next time to get some better photos.

TW Spider: Spider friends! I need your help. Can anyone ID this spider for me? Students and I found a dozen today eating spotted lanternflies. @forthespiders.bsky.social

Another arthropod encountered while surveying spotted lanternflies with students. Giant wheelbug I think

Paleobotanists, come be our colleague at the wonderful Yale Peabody Museum! apply.interfolio.com/194803

I think we need a name for something worse than a wastebasket taxon. Perhaps for a taxonomic name that causes more problems as it careens around datasets, a “dumpster fire taxon” if you will

Me yelling at the fossil record for preserving lots of mollusks

Side note but one of my goals is to have a hypothesis with a cool name. “Red Queen”, “Elvis taxa”, why do we let the invert people get all the cool ones?

Being a scientist is thinking you have a brilliant original idea and then seeing someone had the exact same idea in the 80's.

We acknowledge that we took this land but have no intention of giving any of it back, even when the Supreme Court tells us to.

Hurrah for the Red and Blue!

I have lots of great taxonomic ideas. Turtles, for example, are potentially thyreophoran dinosaurs (shield-bearing). I would also argue that Spinosaurus could be classified as a Gharial.

My bid will be abolishing lungfish and rolling them back into onychodontiformes

Exposed to Paleozoic fishes? You may be entitled to compensation.

Should students be exposed to such dangerous materials as Paleozoic ray-finned fishes?

I'll never forget being told as a kid that the Detroit Zoo might shut down because of the city debt. We have a crisis in management that sees collections as real estate or potential auction items rather than crucial pieces of our shared natural heritage that need to be protected.

Natural history museums are at an inflection point that started with the auctioning of dinosaurs. If Fort Hays State (Sternberg) or Drexel (Acad.Nat.Sci.) think they can monetize collections (i.e., sell natural history specimens); museums become safety deposit boxes instead of research institutes.

🚨🥳🥳🎉🎉🎉 well-deserved!

!

One of my students put a date into a survey form incorrectly, unless they surveyed a building for spotted lanternflies on February fourth, 2006.

Curators don’t usually let you test this but the answer is probably “rock”

Liz did a great job, I was extremely impressed with her ability to bring an animal known from objectively poorly preserved fossils to life.

Thank you!