Dots become dashes - the next stage in the frog life cycle begins as the eggs start to develop and the clutches of frog spawn start to melt into the water. Well over 50 clutches of spawn so far, fairly crucial local population. @tetzoo.bsky.social @stevoallain.bsky.social @froglife.bsky.social
In the summer I visited @rbgkew.bsky.social, during my visit I also visited #ThePowerofTrees in the #SherwoodGallery. This exhibition was designed to help visitors connect with trees and help prevent us all from taking trees for granted. #KewGardens #Botany #Trees stevenallain.co.uk/Blog/scifri-...
Artist’s impression of two large spinosaurus dinosaurs standing in shallow water during a smoky prehistoric wildfire scene, with flying reptiles overhead and one dinosaur roaring while the other stands nearby. Credit: Anthony Hutchings.
wearing round glasses, a green tweed jacket, white shirt, and patterned tie, smiling while seated in an office or lab workspace. Behind him are shelves with files, a computer monitor, and a fossil-like sculpture
Proud to celebrate our dinosaur expert Dr Neil Gostling and former student Thomas Land for their parts in the new Spielberg documentary The Dinosaurs on Netflix 🦕
Dr Gostling researched Spinosaurus habits, and Thomas was a science researcher.
Find out more: www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2026/03...
🚨 New podcast episode available now!
🌳 We speak to recently published People and Nature author Marilisa Herchet about the mental health benefits of urban green 🏙️
🎙️ Listen on Soundcloud ➡️ buff.ly/eK1rfVy
🎙️ Listen on Spotify ➡️ buff.ly/3hWpQn7
I’m not sure, let me try to find out for you.
We’re in the process of trying to get our results published, so watch this space.
Hi Ben, yes it does. We thought it had gone extinct but rediscovered it through the process of this project
Earlier this month I visited @zslofficial.bsky.social for the first of many evenings of talks celebrating #ZSL200, with 'Trailblazers & Pioneers: 200 Years of Wildlife Science'. You can read more about this insightful evening here: stevenallain.co.uk/Blog/scifri-...
#SciFri #ZSL #Conservation
Day 3 leaderboard. Names of teams in semifinal 19 August (teams from universities of Aberdee, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Anglia Ruskin).
🌱🌾🌍🌺🍄🌴🍂🌳🐝🪳 Events in Botanical University Challenge #BUC2026 now pause until August, when the 4 teams with top scores on Day 3 meet in person for quarterfinal and final! Aberdeen, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Anglia Ruskin. Recordings of Days 1 - 3 on our YouTube channel QR code.
Thank you for writing this fantastic blog! We are very pleased to hear that you enjoyed your visit to our museum. 💉
We are thrilled to announce that, thanks to the support of our institutional subscribers, all Royal Society subscription journals will be open access in 2026 through #S2O. Researchers can read all articles and publish #OpenAccess in our eight subscription journals for free buff.ly/4Lu9VpW
I recently visited the Museum of #Anaesthesia in London, and found out more about this fascinating field of science! Thanks @assocanaes.bsky.social for housing this important collection and allowing curious people to visit. #MuseumMonday #MedicalHistory stevenallain.co.uk/Blog/museumm...
I finally did it! I finally visited @whipsnadezoo.bsky.social! You can find out more about this amazing zoo on my blog, along with more of my thoughts. Next time, I'll try to go on a sunnier day! #SciFri #ZSL #Zoos #ZooReview
stevenallain.co.uk/Blog/scifri-...
First, I want to be very clear that I am not speaking in any official capacity for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) with this post. I’ll be speaking of the society of course, but this is not an organizational official statement. I’m also not going to speak super directly to the details of the Epstein Files revelations that erupted over the weekend and still continue. I believe the stories I’ve heard from numerous female SVP members about other behaviors, words and actions by accused individuals and many other men. There should be a robust Ethics Committee investigation that includes the possibility of bannings and revocations as potential consequences for a totality of offenses both recent and otherwise. This goes for any SVP member, not just those with outsized influence or media presence. Communications Committee (which I am co-chair of) was not involved in crafting the statement released by SVP earlier this week. We are discussing how to better integrate relevant committees in future situations that require precise, expeditious official commentary from SVP. While the technical legalistic language in that statement is correct, IMO it severely missed the mark on understanding and acknowledging the hurt and anger amongst membership. The community response appeared to be in part driven by decades of women in membership feeling their real experiences with harassment, objectification, and assault continue to be minimized and ignored. Due to structural inequities, legal fears and power imbalances we especially see influential repeat-offenders relegated to whisper-network warnings rather than face any true professional or personal consequences. As anyone with a shred of empathy can understand, this has over time led to intense and even angry frustration, members quitting the society, and others avoiding membership altogether.
Despite robust cultural and operational changes within SVP over the past 20+ years, the outcomes we are experiencing are still deeply problematic. If the outcomes are chronically proven inadequate, that means the systems producing those outcomes are inadequate, and should be fixed where appropriate or thrown out in favor of a complete rebuild. I have not arrived at these conclusions lightly. I have been in private conversation with current and former SVP members (mostly women) nearly constantly since this past Sunday. Everyone from students who only joined very recently, early careers expressing dismay at the silence of more senior figures, established mid-career members, and those who have left membership in frustration. The act of leadership relies most on listening, and I’ve been doing my best to do that where I can this week. In light of this assessment, and with the help of extensive dialogue which I am immensely grateful for, I have submitted the following action items to SVP leadership to be included in discussion at an upcoming followup town hall meeting: 1) Strongly consider an overhaul to our Code of Conduct rules regarding interpersonal behavior, ethics reporting, and ethics violation policies within the bounds of technical legal protections required for all parties. This includes but is not limited to banning from meetings, banning from society membership, and revocation of Society awards as official potential consequences. If our current systems for dealing with abusive or unprofessional behavior are not getting the job done, we should fix them. 2) Assemble comprehensive, expansive strategies that SVP leadership can implement with the goal of addressing the underlying unprofessional actions and attitudes that lead to misconduct behaviors propagating in our community. In function, the goal is to educationally inoculate against toxic and unprofessional behaviors.
3) SVP will produce a media series that guides members through the full start-to-finish ethics violation reporting and administrative action processes. We believe empowering membership with this information will help us all hold each other accountable and make SVP as safe and welcoming as possible to those wishing to contribute to the betterment of our professional community. (This one is more directly under my control and thus I can speak more assertively about it.) 4) SVP should provide quarterly progress updates on initiatives to address member safety as well as violation accountability procedures. This *would not* mean a change in policy for public disclosures on the details of ongoing ethics violation investigations. It will mean providing members with updates on process overhauls and finding new ways to provide allowable transparency to membership without creating legal vulnerabilities. We are a society of incredibly smart, talented, generous and hardworking people. Circumstantial excuses do not protect our community members. These chronic problems are fixable if we have the collective will to do so. Thanks for your time if you made it all the way through. I look forward to working with anyone with good-faith interest in making the changes our organization clearly still needs.
Regarding events of last week in SVP and the wider vertebrate paleontology community.
Did you know? Insects eat plants as medicine. #OpenAccess
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Just seen this. Yourself, last night while celebrating the ZSL bicentenary.
@adamrutherford.bsky.social Thanks for hosting a great ZSL event last night and glad you liked my question! Fingers crossed we cross paths again in the future.
Due to recent weather challenges in the eastern US, we are extending abstract submission until Feb 15 for all!
Very special #FossilFriday, pleased to announced that we have a new paper out on reconstructing the ecosystem of Dry Mesa Quarry in the Morrison Formation
We used modern ecological techniques to quantity and model the ecosystem
Feel sorry for the baby Sauropods 😞 🦕🦕
Sergey Krasovskiy +Pedro Salas
New video on one of the papers I'm on in the Morrison Formation megavolume is up!
youtu.be/Bsr0j5V5xDM?...
Who doesn't love #dinosaurs? For this week's #SteveReviews, I look at #WhyDinosaurs which is now available to everyone on YouTube. Why not give my review a read, and then give this fantastic documentary a watch? #Fossils #Palaeontology @deanrlomax.bsky.social stevenallain.co.uk/Blog/stevesr...
I’ve not seen them or heard of them eating terns, but have for birds like blue tits, wrens and others that tend to nest in more concealed places. I suspect this is for the same reason you’ve highlighted, predation risk.
If you're in Edinburgh this year, make sure you give the Surgeons' Hall Museums a visit!
Before Christmas I visited the Guildhall Museum in Rochester, and found out more about the history of this interesting town (while taking a break from the Christmas market). There was less natural history than expected. #MuseumMonday #Museums #Rochester #Medway stevenallain.co.uk/Blog/museumm...
Hear from BTO about the Ring-necked Parakeet population in the UK in this feature from @theguardian.com #Birds
At the moment it is unlikely to get a license from Nature England due to numerous risks that could jeopardise other extant native species.
BBC News - Three frogs to be reintroduced to West Acre 'pingos' - BBC News
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Where was some Appetite for Destruction that was also killing it in ‘87?
This is true. There are a few songs that I thought would have made it in, that didn’t.
The Duffer Brothers missed a trick with Stranger Things Season 5, plenty of wall-related music from Pink Floyd just sitting there, waiting to be used!
