Richard Fallon

Wouldn't want too much time to go by without reminding the public at large that my book Contesting Earth's History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860-1935 would probably look very nice in your local library, so you could ask them to buy it and test this hypothesis.

Today!

Welcoming a new UK iguanodontian, Paludohadros proudlovii, to the Wealden bestiary, a project led by @ricardosacamoto.bsky.social, @tweetisaurus.bsky.social & @valdosaurus.bsky.social based on material excavated by @nhm-london.bsky.social >20 years ago. Lovely reconstruction from Guilherme Gehr.

Very glad to start a new week with the release of a new article: "Trading the Globe's Flora from the German Provinces: The Unio Itineraria in Esslingen, 1825-1845" (Itinerario) and co-written with the lovely Ella D. Müller ✨ #envhist #histsci #collections Available OA: doi.org/10.1017/S016...

Sure to be a great session this Wednesday in the Hidden Hands in Colonial Natural History working group: we'll hear Cameron Daddis's paper on '“Bog Man” and the Body in Deep Time: Collecting the Dead in Nineteenth-Century Ireland'. Sign-up necessary, but well worth it (www.chstm.org/group/hidden...)

Modestly low-key art nouveau piano at the House for an Art Lover in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow (which was built in the 1990s to an early c20th Charles Rennie Mackintosh design).

Unlike other parts of the museum’s collection, the dioramas are near-immovable historic artifacts. Preserving them would require significant time, labor, and money, perhaps millions of dollars.

The House on the Borderland sure has inspired some brilliant covers. Not sure about the corn cob.

My friend Patrick Prominski and I are working on an edited volume on how now-discredited ideas involving biology (widely construed) were used in scientific fiction from c. 1825-1925. If you have any ideas for anything even broadly along those lines, please pitch them, we'd love to see them!

It’s a dark and stormy night here, with weather warnings for the weekend, but I’m happy to be stuck indoors with my rather battered copy of The Fossil Woman A Life of Mary Anning and the just arrived, crisp, clean (for the time being) proofs of Mary Anning The Companion Guide, due out spring 2027.

This is a The Lost World: Jurassic Park squishy Pachycephalosaurus egg. God only knows what fluids have been festering in this sac for the last 19 years.

University of Nottingham, right now, is cutting 560 jobs. Do we need to rebrand universities as very large, very clean, land-based oil rigs to get government support?

You know those stories you avoid because they couldn't possibly be as good as the cover?

Back in the day, you could get a silly poem about Stegosaurus on a postcard and not think twice. From Colin Forbes's scrapbook in the archives of @sedgwickmuseum.bsky.social. Note, 'Joke'.

‘The rapidly changing world of today’ (as viewed from 1968) (Kings and Queens, book 2, 1968) Artist: Frank Hampson

Okay, we’ve highlighted the work of Grace Edwards (1874-1965) before, but we noticed the date on this photograph so… #OTD #WomenArtists #WomenInScience #Archives #SciArt #NatureInArt

In the long-running Italian comic Dylan Dog, the occult detective protagonist has a sidekick who looks and sounds like Groucho Marx, called Groucho. There are wonders out there, for those who care to look.

October 17, 1920, The Washington Times with some surprising science news 🐈🦖 www.loc.gov/resource/sn8...

A very exciting day for the @curioustravellers.bsky.social launching the digital edition of Thomas Pennant’s Tour of Wales and the new exhibition on Pennant at NLW. You can find out more about the project, Thomas Pennant, and access the digital editions at curioustravellers.ac.uk

I didn't realise that Prehistoric Peeps – as @koprolitos.bsky.social says, the earliest surviving film to, er, 'depict' prehistoric animals – could be seen on Youtube. My eyes!

An image (originally 1892, by Joseph Smit) unsubtly imitated in E. Ray Lankester's Extinct Animals (1905, left) through which it found its way into P. L. Forbes's artwork for Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912, right).

This Allosaurus makes me think about an alternative timeline where dinosaurs are directly evolved from crocodiles instead of being a cousin of them.

This is Dubreuillosaurus. Known from one fossil, the holotype. Described in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2002. Accessioned into France's national collection, the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, as MNHN 1998-13. Now up for auction. HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?

I’m pleased to announce that the next annual conference of The British Society for Literature and Science (@thebsls.bsky.social) will be in Oxford, 1-3 April 2027. The Call for Papers is live on the BSLS’s website: www.bsls.ac.uk/2026/10/bsls...

Interested in pursuing a funded PhD in Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling? Our AHRC Doctoral Landscape Award competition is now live. Come study with us! www.findaphd.com/phds/program...

I should point out whenever this image circulates that the disgust late c19th and early c20th audiences felt at Stegosaurus (and Triceratops) is a primary topic of chapter 2 in my first book, Reimagining Dinosaurs.

I am absolutely delighted to announce that the open access version of "In Referees We Trust? How Peer Review Became a Mark of Scientific Legitimacy" is now live! Want to know more about how scholars' lives came to be ruled by Reviewer 2? Download the book FREE at: direct.mit.edu/books/monogr...

Big news: @chrismanias.bsky.social and I are planning a #PALEOART MEETING in London for early next year: a whole day devoted to palaeoart practice, science, history and culture. Interested? Please complete and share this survey to help shape our plans! forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/respon...

Excited to host this free event on Riverflies on 12 November for @theul.bsky.social and @camglamresearch.bsky.social. Featuring Mark Wormald, WildFish, Louise Berridge @nhm-london.bsky.social and Zoë Simmons @morethanadodo.bsky.social. Register at www.lib.cam.ac.uk/whats/riverf...

Bit unnerving to know that the word 'hubby' was around in 1818, and that Edgar Allan Poe probably heard it used.

For connoisseurs of fictional psychical research societies, you get a good scene at a meeting of the 'Royal Canadian Occult Society' in the Baskervilles-esque wartime Sherlock Holmes film The Scarlet Claw.

Fenlands, Herbarium Collections, and Botanical Illustration at Cambridge. New blogpost by Camila Alday Mamani, Hosted Fellow, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. www.ccc.cam.ac.uk/blog/fenland... @cuherb.bsky.social @crasshlive.bsky.social

Post Modern interiors. Not many left. Free link. www.ft.com/content/431e... Gaudy, kitsch – and utterly glorious. Save our postmodern interiors

Yesterday evening I attended an lovely book launch (remember when those were a thing?) for @gailmarshall.bsky.social 's superb "Britain in 1859": www.cambridge.org/core/books/b...

Hmm. Not sure if Suffolk would seem more or less menacing to an Italian reader than to a British one.

The Science of Lost Worlds is out! OA! illustrations by the magnificent Jim Robins, audiobook feat the amazing Boo Jackson as Prof Ichthy. Delicious paleontological #philsci for your reading/listening pleasure. So many people helped me make this - much greatful ucp.manifoldapp.org/projects/978...

Kazuo Ishiguro,

Shout out for Megalosaurus drawn by Mary Morland for William Buckland this #FossilFriday just discussed by Emma Nicholls @morethanadodo.bsky.social et al on In Our Time #BBCRadio4 #hoggroup

Frutti di mare. Northumberland Bestiary, London ca. 1250-1260. LA, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 100, fol. 48v. #medieval #MedievalArt

At current rates I should be able to get through A. H. Quinn's big Poe biography in a few years of commuting. Looks to be quite a few more trips with Greater Anglia before he's born.

Megalosaurus on In Our Time! What a great topic (what a great show). Historians of palaeontology having an aneurysm at seeing Cadbury's The Dinosaur Hunters listed as the recommend reading in the Year of Our Lord MMXXVI though.

Being told by an anime girl I can't read a ebook on women in twentieth-century science and engineering.

I don't think there's a wide audience for this post, but there are quite a few images of the Atlantis and Lemuria theorist William Scott-Elliot (1849–1919) floating around the internet, so it's interesting to note that most, possibly all of them are not him.