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Reposted by Stephen Heard

Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 2h

I was a bookseller in my youth. One of my favorite things to do is boost awesome books by awesome people. If you've published a book in 2025, please let me know so I can read it in time for my annual Weirdly Specific Book Recommendations, shared each December for all your holiday shopping needs.

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 1h

Thanks, Andrés!

Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 3h

The other day I got to hold an ivory-billed woodpecker. It hit pretty hard - some thoughts here.

Close encounters of the extinct kind

I’m a huge museum nerd. When I travel, museums are top of my list – and it doesn’t matter a whole lot what they’re museums of.* But what’s even better than a day at a museum is a chance to tour a m…

scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 1d

A reflection on the extinction, and museums, and the simultaneous excitement and sadness of getting to hold an ivory-billed woodpecker.

Close encounters of the extinct kind

I’m a huge museum nerd. When I travel, museums are top of my list – and it doesn’t matter a whole lot what they’re museums of.* But what’s even better than a day at a museum is a chance to tour a m…

scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 2d

1. This specimen is very cool
2 Nick's hashtag game is VERY strong

Nick Dulvy @nickdulvy.bsky.social · 2d

#Sawfish

#MetabolicMorphology #SharksNearMe #DulvyLabGoesOutside #LoveMuseums #RaysNeedLoveToo #Paris #Brusselles #HamburgNaturalHistoryMuseum #NaturalHistoryMuseumDeParis

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Reposted by Stephen Heard

Ada Lovelace Day @adalovelaceday.bsky.social · 2d

How many different careers are open to STEM grads? With real info from grads in 15 different fields plus nearly 350 different jobs and areas of further study, The Amazingly Enormous Careers Poster drives home the point that STEM opens doors. findingada.com/resou... #ALD25

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 2d

My Thanksgiving turkey is in the oven. But no marshmallow will ever touch my sweet potatoes.... (If this confuses you, watch to the end)

Brittlestar @brittlestar.com · 3d

Explaining Canadian Thanksgiving to Americans

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 2d

My Thanksgiving turkey is in the oven. But a marshmallow will never touch my sweet potatoes. (If that confuses you, watch to the end)

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 3d

Can't wait to find out if the blog post I just scheduled for Tuesday counts as "ivory-billed woodpecker discourse"...

A mounted ivory-billed woodpecker. It's a large woodpecker with a flaming red cap, a yellow-ivory bill, a sharp white blaze on the side of the neck, and white wing patches that look like the back half of its back. Behind are specimen cabinets, carts, specimen trays, and other museum parephernalia.

Reposted by Stephen Heard

Darren Irwin (he / him) @darrenirwin.bsky.social · 3d

In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand.

"Developed new species concept"

Marjorie James Keenan @unenthusiast.com · 3d

In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand.

rm -rf ~/

hammancheez @hammancheez.bsky.social · 3d

"The chancellor approved it"

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 3d

Agreed!

Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 3d

Cosign. Those of us with amped-up "bitter" taste buds will never understand kale. But also: happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving!

dawnymock @dawnymock.bsky.social · 3d

For those who have followed me a long time, you know I love to pick on kale (there’s actually a chopped kale salad I like… don’t tell anyone, especially not kale!) #HappyThanksgiving

dawnymock cartoon of kale taking to cornucopia, saying “hey, why wasn’t I invited “

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Reposted by Stephen Heard

Ben Miller @extinctmonsters.bsky.social · 5d

The Peale mastodon at the National Portrait Gallery in 2021.

It’s the 1st mounted fossil skeleton displayed in the US (1805), and 2nd worldwide. Its original viewers didn’t know about evolution. Even extinction was a new concept. More fossils interpreted as history and art, please! #FossilFriday

Mastodon skeleton with long tusks on a gravel bed between two white columns in an art gallery. Seen from the front.

Same from driver side rear view. Red curtain entrance to exhibit is visible from
This angle

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 5d

Wish I had an uplifting note to end this on. We are more aware of this than ever, and many smart people are working hard. I guess that's what I've got.

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 5d

And yet these extinctions are a tiny, tiny fraction of what's being lost. Birds are charismatic - but 99.9% of Earth's biodiversity is in less-well-known taxa. Where we often don't know if something is extinct or not; where species are often lost before they even become known.

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 5d

Yesterday I was looking at passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, and ivory-billed woodpeckers in a museum collection. They hit hard, and so does this.

Dr Alex Bond @thelabandfield.bsky.social · 5d

Well, it's official. After our paper last year (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....), the Slender-billed Curlew is officially declared Extinct today.

Scientists dream of describing new species, not writing their obituary and epitaph, knowing that they are gone forever #ornithology

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 5d

Had a wonderful tour of the collections at the New Brunswick Museum yesterday. Among many other things there were #SharksNearMe - these are jaws from the blue shark, Prionace glauca.

Saw many treasures - a few I'll post later; some so new and wonderful that I can't post about them here!

A museum drawer pulled open to show about a dozen shark jaws resting on white foam. Each is about 8" wide with sharp teeth all along lower and upper jaws.

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Reposted by Stephen Heard

Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 8d

NSF instructs peer reviewers not to use the first person in writing a review. Why on earth? And isn't this terrible advice?

There’s no “I” in “peer review” – or is there?

In which occasional guest blogger Greg Crowther asks me a peer review question that stumps me – so together, we puzzle it out. Greg: Steve, I was recently reviewing some grant proposals for NSF whe…

scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com

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Reposted by Stephen Heard

Dr. Viktor Baranov🧪🦟🐛🪲 @swarmofthoughts.bsky.social · 7d

thread 1/9
How a 150 MYA fly from Australia helped us understand continental drift 🪰🌏🧪🦖
Meet Telmatomyia talbragarica — a new Jurassic non-biting midge (Diptera: Chironomidae) from the Talbragar Fish Beds, NSW. It once clung to life in a Jurassic lake. @ebdonana.bsky.social
tinyurl.com/2v3kx4h7

The oldest Gondwanan non-biting midge (Diptera, Chironomidae, Podonominae) sheds light on the historical biogeography of the clade

Podonominae, a group of non-biting midges within the Chironomidae family, serves as an important biogeographical model. For a long time, it was believ…

tinyurl.com

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Reposted by Stephen Heard

Soh Kam Yung @sohkamyung.bsky.social · 7d

My first pseudoscorpion observation was pure luck. Happen to see this wasp and took a shot. It was only later did I see what was hanging on the antenna.

On iNaturalist [ www.inaturalist.org/observations... ]

A brown pseudoscopion hanging on to the antenna of a wasp. The wasp is yellow with black stripes and transparent wings.

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Reposted by Stephen Heard

Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 8d

I've been working on a book proposal and alternating between "this is meaningful" and "this is pointless," and a friend recently shared this quote that she stumble on in a Goodreads review: "Every book is a grand gesture of optimism on the part of both the reader and writer." Keep creating, friends.

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 8d

So we hope the book (scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2024/12/10/w...) will help with that bit, at least. But read @briles34.bsky.social's preprint - there's lots more to it!

What our new book looks like: “Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences”

About a year ago, I posted some basic information about my new book, coauthored with the brilliant Bethann Garramon Merkle. It’s time for an update: as books grow up, they change and presumably imp…

scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 8d

One issue the preprint identifies is that mentors are super important - but they (we!) lack training in effective writing mentorship. That's exactly why @bgmerkle.bsky.social and I wrote our forthcoming book, 'Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences" - our next month.

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 8d

Fascinating preprint from @briles34.bsky.social asking how physics and astronomy students learn to write. A LOT of it resonated with me, and you can imagine that I Have Thoughts! www.arxiv.org/abs/2510.03493

Surveying the State of Writing Education in Physics and Astronomy

Writing is a critical skill for modern science, enabling collaboration, scientific discourse, public outreach, and more. Accordingly, it is important to consider how physicists and astronomers are tra...

www.arxiv.org

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Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · 8d

Ooh! Thanks. Yes, extremely interesting - I can feel a blog post coming on to discuss this.

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