Tostoini

Tostoini

@tostoini.it

Illustrator with a soft spot for odd creatures, graphic recorder, friend of manatees, anthropologist, ND. I wrote&illustrated Fossili Viventi published by Aboca Kids. She/her www.tostoini.it

1.1K followers558 following4.3K posts

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Insomma: il Libro Nuovo si intitola Fossili Viventi, esce per Aboca Kids in anteprima al Salone del Libro di Torino il 19 maggio e in libreria dal 30 maggio. Ci sono dentro storie di creature peculiari dal passato e presente del pianeta.

Tostoini reposted

genAI boosters are always like “you think you’re better than me because you drew a picture? You think you’re better than me because you read a book?” and it’s like, well, no, but you seem very unhappy

Tostoini reposted

Why don't you see penis bones in #museums? I spoke to @iflscience.com about how museums have been deliberately modifying the anatomy of their specimens: they knowingly mislead visitors about what most male mammal skeletons look like, as I wrote in #NaturesMemory: www.iflscience.com/the-majority...

iflscience.comWhy Don’t Humans Have A Penis Bone When The Majority Of Mammals Do?And why they’re surprisingly hard to find in natural history museums.

I did not know that my people* went around the moon and back! IN THE GRAND TRADITION OF THE GREAT A'TUIN AND ALL OTHER SPACE TURTLES! * Tostoini in Sardinian language means turtle, so all chelonids, extants, extincts and fictional, are my people, of course

Dr Space Junk (Alice Gorman)@drspacejunk.bsky.social

Let's spare a thought for space animals on #WorldAnimalDay! In 1968, two tortoises went around the Moon and came safely back to Earth on the Soviet spacecraft Zond 5. 🧪

A month under the banner of Conflict & Care. a newsletter full of beautiful pigeons, moving poems about swimming and doing the washing, being made of flammable materials and going against the grain eighty years ago and today. patreon.com/posts/169532386

Strong vibes of an absolutely normal day of summer on the seaside in Sardinia with a missils and assorted weapons shooting range in the background

Alariko@alariko.bsky.social

As I'm about to board a plane to my hometown in Sardinia, this is where I'm spend the next days, morally & physically embracing this heraldic symbol of Italian August and of the holidays of people worldwide who live away from where they're born and spend part of their summer at home, just being.

Is it really summer if you're not listening for *hours* to @paulmmcooper.com during a long drive to a place to walk, swim or just stare at animals & plants doing their thing, cooking, pausing the podcast in ten minutes intervals to discuss what you're discovering about the world? I DON'T THINK SO.

Fall of Civilizations Podcast@fallofcivilizations.com

🏝️🌋 Episode 21 is now live! 🌋🏝️ This time we look at the Majapahit Empire on the island of Java. With traditional music, shadow puppet performances, and readings in Old Javanese, find out how the empire of the islands fell. YouTube: youtu.be/01CZBhZM430?... Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3xZ9...

Finally I get to do my best "Di Caprio's meme impression" pointing wildly at the screen while watching Eons!

franz@franzanth.bsky.social

Eons: Life and Death on Pangaea thread The Eons team trusted @lacerdajulio.bsky.social @kiabugboy.bsky.social and myself to help with the reconstructions for the series. I'm consolidating my posts to this thread so that they're easier to find. #Art #SciArt #PaleoArt Watch link:

2026 so far has been very much a "Cried but did *the* Thing" kind of year, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. So go ahead, give yourself a pat on the shoulder and take your badge of honor: it's very much deserved.

Tostoini@tostoini.it

Come collect your prize. You know you DESERVE this. 🎖

Maybe I was not the audience for the movie, I was a kid that chose the picture book version of the Odissey as her first book, and I'm an adult that loves antiquities and museums, but that washed out, grey vision of the Mediterranean sea that looked more like the Northern sea felt so incredibly dull

Tostoini@tostoini.it

This summer while I was finishing the pages I was due for the book I'm working on I stumbled on a call for illustration on wine. I was drawing waves for a couple of days, so I immediately thought about Homer and the concept of wine-colored sea. Also because ancient vase are quite fun to draw.

The monsters were grey, the cyclops was grey, the sirens were grey, the clothes were different shades of mud. You can do so much with the images of Bronze Age, so many ideas and inspired visions, and instead we're stuck with Gritty Mediterranean Epos

Say no to another set of boring humans on your money! A vote for the bird bills is a vote for #sciart! (I am way more invested in the bird money poll that I am ready to admit)

Nedge@nedg3.bsky.social

Praying that people vote for the bird euro bills 😭🙏

Just imagine Charles Dickens posting a 1/? neverending chain of posts after seen Nolan's Odyssey. Oh Charlie you could have been right at home on the internet

Paul Cooper@paulmmcooper.com

Always find it so funny that Charles Dickens got so red and mad about this painting. He stomped all the way home from the viewing and wrote this, still angry.

If we are making progress but we don't have a definite destination in mind to make progress toward, maybe instead of making progress should we call it a stroll? In that case, we should definitively get ice cream along the way. A post for my manapeeps on Patreon! www.patreon.com/tostoini/pos...

I love making pet portraits, browsing cat pictures FOR WORK, developing a parasocial relation with the subjects of the illustration, hearing stories about them to decide how to best capture their characters. I loved drawing those two, she'e even rounder than this, and he's even lōôœnger.

One of the perks of being an illustration is that you are allowed to go back to your older illos and make another pass on them! It's allowed! It's not cheating! #sciart

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or Uromys Vika, an arboreal rodent re-discovered in Vangunu in 2015, after decades of research based on stories and nibbled coconuts.

One of the perks of being an illustration is that you are allowed to go back to your older illos and make another pass on them! It's allowed! It's not cheating! #sciart

Animals we didn't know that existed, and now we do: creatures we didn’t know were around, like Eulophophyllum kirki, Eriovixia Gryffindori, or Pheidole Drogon, an ant from Papua New Guinea with a spiny back named after the big dragon in Game of Thrones.

Tostoini reposted

"Juvenile male elephant seals need to practice for dominance battles in which adults rear up and crash their chests together... with no other juveniles to practice with, Neil can only rehearse on Toyotas." Neil the seal, welcome to The War on Cars.

NPR@npr.org

The 5-year-old seal has a social media following twice the size of Tasmania's population, and his antics include bending traffic bollards and blocking roads. n.pr/4bqqXr5

Sharing with my good fellows from the #sciart feed 🐡 🌈

Tostoini@tostoini.it

Aside from humans, manatee have no predators. Adults can swim alongside crocodiles and nobody will try to take a bite. If you think that's baffling you should remember that yes, they're gentle giants, but they're still giants. They defend themselves by taking up space.

Aside from humans, manatee have no predators. Adults can swim alongside crocodiles and nobody will try to take a bite. If you think that's baffling you should remember that yes, they're gentle giants, but they're still giants. They defend themselves by taking up space.

I found this a good metaphor for this moment, when we're asked to make ourselves small, make yourself invisible, be unobtrusive. So: take up space. Take up as much space as it's possibile (and safe), and if you're not big, take up space with others. Be a nuisance by existing on your terms. 🌈

Yes please. Also: museum curators please consider to have a itinerary in your collection of all the friend-shaped art, we're here for it. (And replicas in your shop. I don't want another notebook with yout Famous Masterpiece, I want a little animal figurine and a cuneiform tablet cookie cutter)

Dr Alex Fitzpatrick@animalarchaeology.com

I am proposing to my fellow archaeologists and museum curators a new, cross-cultural typology: “friend-shaped”. Can be used concurrently with “little guys” as well.

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Or maybe I just like talking enthusiastically about stuff that I care about. Not a "buy stuff! here's a discount code" newsletter, this is a bit more like one of those places from the internet of old where a weirdo (me) will share passionately about the topics dear to their heart.

Usually those are picture books, weird creatures, fungi, what podcast is keeping me company while I draw, animation, something interesting from my past dabbing in anthropology that I still find relevant and useful to understand the world around us, what I'm working on, what I'm doing, and where.

This is clearly the iridescent pink transparent plastic toy with sparkly fake jewels that all of us Eighties little girls brought to the beach, that by the end of the summer was sanded by being in to many sand castles and missing most of its jewels

Chapps@chapps.bsky.social

One of the smaller antiquities in the #BrooklynMuseum is this ancient #Egyptian soft-shelled turtle amulet, made of amethyst. The spots are inlaid semi-precious stones: turquoise, red jasper, and lapis lazuli. Buried with the dead as a protective charm, it also represented rebirth. 🏺 1/ 📸 me

Spent the day at Artropocene Festival (excellent name) speaking about why treating science, science communication, art, creativity & humour like they're separate is part of the reason we're in this mess. I finally met a gar in person! And a Insulindian Phasmid from Disco Elysium! A very #sciart day.

I'm very proud of myself for sendind my patreon their monthly illustration while bouncing around Italy speaking to children on the inexhaustible topic of weird but real creatures. If you want to subscribe to you monthly dose of manatees - or, this month sloths: www.patreon.com/posts/beacon...