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Tom Astle

@tjalamont.bsky.social

31K followers 1.9K following 2.2K posts

Writer & nature photographer, especially macro photography of arthropods. Desert Tortoise conservation advocate. Fan of California, Montana, the rest of the planet. Photo website: https://www.tomastlephotography.com/

www.tomastlephotography.com

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 1h

For Indigenous People's Day, here's a spear/arrow point from the Mojave Desert. The kind of photography I do means I spend a lot of time staring at the ground, so a stone that didn't quite match stood out. You can see where it's been knapped; the people who lived here historically were the Nuwä.

A photo of a red, flat stone lying on the orange-tan desert floor. The stone has been knapped - worked by hand to make it into a sharp-edged arrow or spear point. It is likely a fragment of a larger spear or arrowhead.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 9h

Do any fungi folks know what these little gumdrop-looking globes are? Each one was under a millimeter in diameter. I found them on the underside of a fallen, decaying Joshua tree branch in the Mojave Desert. 🍄

A closeup photo of decaying wood, covered with many small, white, round, gumdrop-looking growths, perhaps the fruiting bodies of a sort of fungus.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 9h

Per Bugguide, the female moths can crawl underwater as much as four meters deep! I would love to find a caterpillar or witness a moth crawling into my pond, but so far no luck.

Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 11h

For #Arachtober, here is a spider that's not a spider. It's Petrophila jaliscalis, a jumping-spider-mimicking moth - see the face-on spider pattern, with orange legs and sparkly dark eyes? I love finding these - I think they breed in my small goldfish pond, because the caterpillars are aquatic. 🌿🐙

A macro photo of a moth, seen from the side, on brown bark. The moth has white wings with lots of dark speckles, and a pattern of four orange vertical stripes, plus a row of dark spots above, with reflective scales in the centers. The effect creates a pattern that looks like a jumping spider seen face-on; the orange stripes mimic legs, and the dark spots mimic a jumping spider's row of large eyes.

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Reposted by Tom Astle

Marshal Hedin @mhedin.bsky.social · 12d

an amazing Habronattus jumping spider known only from a single spring in the bottom of an impossibly isolated and lonely desert valley

jumping spider with large central eyes, a white diamond sitting directly between the central eyes, all surrounded by a striking red mask which flows to the sides of the face, itself expanded laterally

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 1d

A phone pic of Ms Mantis this morning in my garden. She’s still catching bugs, but you can see by the necrotic black area on her foreleg that her season is winding down. I’m sure she’s laid an egg case or two, and hopefully she’ll have time to lay at least one more. 🐙🌿

A phone pic of a green mantis hanging out under a green leaf and a pink flower on a sunny day. One of her raptorial forelegs is turning black, indicating she’s starting to approach the end of her life.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 2d

Here is your Saturday Spider, a fluffy Aphonopelma sp. tarantula in southeastern Arizona. They're usually on the ground, but this one climbed about a foot up into a spindly dry shrub. I thought B&W suited this portrait. #Arachtober 🌿🐙🕷️

A black and white photo looking straight into the fuzzy face of a tarantula, which is balanced on thin dry twigs.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 4d

--birthday present. It was from my aunt Liz, who never bought generic presents but always found gifts specific to me, the science/animal kid: hermit crabs for my birthday, geckos for Christmas.

Tomorrow, I'm going to Liz's funeral. Thanks, aunt Liz, from the boy who is still wild about dinosaurs. 🦕

A closeup detail of the title page of a 1960s era dinosaur book, showing a skeleton of a pterosaur and the last five letters of the word "Dinosaurs." At the top is an inscription: "To Tommy J. on his fifth birthday - who, I hear, is wild about Dinosaurs. Love Aunt Liz".

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 4d

--Mary Anning's discoveries. It's the most memorable plate in the book for me; it was in my head when I finally saw Mary Anning's fossils at the @nhm-london.bsky.social in London two years ago, and it's why I had tears in my eyes.

Finally, a postscript. As I said at the start, this book was a--

A color plate illustration from a 1960s era dinosaur book, showing Mary Anning, the woman who discovered Ichthyosaurs, looking at a fossil skeleton of an ichthyosaur embedded in a cliff on England's Jurassic coast.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 4d

--plate showcasing a dynamic scene, not just large lumbering beasts in a static environment. But I think most importantly, this book is how I learned about--

A color plate illustration from a 1960s era dinosaur book, showing a smaller Ornitholestes dinosaur leaping to try to grab one of the two Archaeopteryx (early birds) flying away from it. The landscape depicts tree ferns and conifers.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 4d

--art. I loved this page, showing dinosaurs as agile swimmers and not just slow brutes. I think he imagined more than the science of his time; I can't think of another image like it from my other kid dino books. Here's another--

A color plate illustration from a 1960s era dinosaur book, showing two different crested, duck-bill-type dinosaurs, Corythosaurus and Parasaurolophus, fully underwater and swimming near each other.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 4d

--that extinction is therefore their fault. It's a story that is used (every. single. time.) to make us feel not only blameless but superior and deserving (see the opossums in this illustration?) when extinctions occur, especially ones for which we are in fact responsible. But back to Zallinger's--

A color plate illustration from a 1960s era dinosaur book, showing a deceased T-rex on a beach, with a storm raging in from the sea, whipping the palm trees in the background. Near the dead dino in lower right are tiny opossums, symbolic of the mammals that would outlive the dinosaurs.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 4d

--to five-year-old me it made sense. I remember feeling bad for them. I thought it must have been hard to be so heavy and slow. What I didn't realize then was that this narrative was also victim-blaming, part of an overall narrative that extinct creatures are always ill-suited for survival and--

A color plate illustration from a 1960s era dinosaur book, showing Brachiosaurus half submerged in a swamp. A flying pterosaur is in the deep background, along with two other Brachiosaurs, one half submerged, one out of the water. The top of the head of one more is barely peeking out of the water.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 4d

--I learned that flowering plants weren't abundant until the Cretaceous. Back then, large sauropods were thought to be heavy and awkward, so much so that they required water to support their bodies. We don't think that now, of course, but--

A color plate illustration from a 1960s era dinosaur book, showing Monoclonius, a single-horned Ceratopsian dinosaur, with some early flowering plants nearby.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 4d

--Allosaurus remains my favorite badass theropod meat-eater; T-rex in the book is big, and gets his own story, but he's just brown, whereas Allosaurus is orange and stripey and just, well, cooler. The illustrations (like the mural) also do a pretty good job on vegetation; this book is how--

A color plate illustration from a 1960s era dinosaur book, showing an orange colored Allosaurus biting the neck of a Brontosaurus, which is standing up to its belly in a swamp. Another Allosaurus and a duck-billed dinosaur are in the deep background.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 4d

--earth-toned and and tail-dragging, because that's what was thought then. However, I was captivated by the exceptions Zallinger depicted with vibrant colors - this Plateosaurus was my favorite. Even at five I knew modern reptiles were often colorful, so it just made sense. I think it's why--

A color plate illustration from a 1960s era dinosaur book, showing three Plateosaurus dinos in a green, fern-dominated landscape. The dinosaurs are depicted as bluish-purple with reddish banding.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 4d

--illustrated by Rudolph Zallinger, the artist famous for his 1947 110-foot mural "Age of Reptiles" at the Yale Peabody Museum (which I've never seen in person and would dearly love to). The art is gorgeous, but of course the ancient reptiles are mostly described and depicted as slow and--

A color plate illustration from a 1960s era dinosaur book, showing sail-backed early reptiles, Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 4d

🧵1/10 @sophiesaurus98.bsky.social posted a great thread the other day about a beloved childhood dinosaur book and her young ideas about it. I thought I'd chime in with my own. I got this book for my 5th birthday in 1965(!) It was written by Jane Werner Watson (author of a zillion Golden Books) and--

The cover of a book called "Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Reptiles," showing a color illustration of a brachiosaurus eating ferns while half submerged in a swamp, with an Allosaurus in the background along with a flying pteranosaur. The book is worn, with tape holding the binding.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 4d

I was lucky - it wasn’t too swampy and I found flytraps and some really nice pitchers 🪰🪤

Reposted by Tom Astle

Nash Turley @nashturley.bsky.social · 4d

Big fan of this weevil's color scheme, pointy snoot, and huge feet!

www.inaturalist.org/observations...

black and yellow weevil on a green leaf with long thin rostrum and very large foot pads

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 4d

Throwback pic from October '21 of a female Golden Orb Weaver (Trichonephila clavipes) at Green Swamp Preserve, NC. The background shows a hint of the habitat, longleaf pine savanna. I love this shot because it reminds me of a gorgeous day; I saw only one other person in six hours. #Arachtober 🌿🐙📷

A closeup photo of a golden orb weaver spider, hanging upside down diagonally along a strand of silk. The spider has an elongated orange abdomen, and long orange and black banded legs. The background is out of focus vertical tree trunks in the upper third, with greenery in the lower two thirds.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 5d

A tiny moth, barely bigger than a rice grain, from the Mojave Desert. The curved "horns" are mouthparts, the labial palps. They help the moth both taste and smell - including being sensitive to changes in CO2 levels. I think they make the moth look like a mythological creature up close. 🐙🌿

A macro photo of a ghostly white moth on almost-white sand. The moth is seen from a front 3/4 angle; only the face and part of one antenna are in focus, and the back third of the body is out of frame. The moth has long, backward curving mouthparts called labial palps that look a bit like the curved horns of a mountain goat.

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 5d

Thanks for all the kind comments, everyone 🐾

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Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 5d

Thanks, Kris.

Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social · 5d

Thank you, Greta.