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Dave Rodland

@daverodland.bsky.social

450 followers 180 following 1.4K posts

Geologist to the 3rd degree and (formerly) professional necromancer. Paleoecology, taphonomy, stratigraphy, marine biology ... all things Earth history. Living in the past and talking to dead things since the late Holocene.

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Reposted by Dave Rodland

Heather Shearer @heather-sea55.bsky.social · 1d

🧪 cool and fascinating #SciComm

theconversation.com/unusual-red-...

Unusual red rocks in Australia are rewriting the rules on exceptional fossil sites

Highly detailed fossils are typically found in shale or other fine-grained sedimentary rocks. These ones? They’re made of iron.

theconversation.com

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Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 3h

Naah. The students are a significant part of the job. Arguably the most important, given exponential functions in the spread of knowledge.

Yeah, the pubs do that work too, but someone has to train (inspire!) the people who might read them, cite them, refute them (d'oh!).

Teach the best you can.

Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 5h

As the saying goes, "The early worm gets the bird."

Or bug. Whatevs.

Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 8h

I've been telling people for years, there's no need to fool around with all that mosquito amber hanky-panky when we can have feathered, sickle-toed phorusrhacid cousins at home.

Darwin spent a disconcerting amount of painful, Victorian verbiage on the selective breeding of domestic birds.

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Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 8h

Got distracted and missed mollusk Monday, so I guess I have to jump to #TrilobiteTuesday. 🧪⚒️

This is a lovely example of Rusophycus on display at the Cincinnati Museum Center, illustrating predator / prey dynamics of the Ordovician. To wit: a trilobite scooped a worm out of its burrow to feed!

Cincinnati Museum Center exhibit on the trilobite trace fossil Rusophycus carleyi: an impression of the underside of a trilobite with inward curving grooves excavated by the legs scooping soft sediment in search of food. The trace intersects a worm burrow, implying a successful hunt.

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Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 12h

Seriemas have entered the chat ...

Red-legged seriema prey-thrashing behavior

YouTube video by WitmerLab

youtu.be

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Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 13h

The former Olof Olofsson (no joke) volunteered for the Union Army with a bunch of Bishop Hill lads desperate to prove they were real Americans. Marched under Sherman from Ft. Donelson to Savannah, by way of Shiloh and Atlanta. Not sure why, but the Army managed to misspell his adopted last name.

Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 13h

My great-great Swedish ancestors were Jensenists in the first wave (well, you know, post-Vinland). Bishop Hill had more than a little in common with Joseph Smith's little social experiment.

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Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 1d

Pretty rude of you to just pick up someone else's hat and wear it like that, honestly. 😆

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Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 1d

Now, look here, bud ...

a cartoon of spongebob saying " ayy !! i 'll let myself out "

Alt: a cartoon of spongebob saying " ayy !! i 'll let myself out "

media.tenor.com

Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 1d

Trade-offs balancing disruption vs. necessity. Laptop bag left by the door, no problem.

Hat on the podium? It'll wait.

Student going into anaphylaxis in the hallway and the lecturer has put your Epi-pen in their trouser pocket? Class is getting disrupted.

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Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 1d

Cretaceous? Looks like a Baculites fragment in that last pic. Nice clam too!

Invert workers don't document sites in the same detail as archeology, but that's because bioturbation and time averaging defeat the purpose in a lot of settings.

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Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 1d

Iykyk ❤️🦖☠️

Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 1d

CMC does have that Art Deco Hall of Justice vibe going, doesn't it?

Interior view of Cincinnati Museum Center atrium, facing the doors. An enormous Art Deco style half dome lit bit windows across the front face, painted in various shades of yellow. A large American flag hangs from the ceiling, while in the upper left part of a banner advertises the Nancy and David Wolf Holocaust and Humanity Center.

Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 1d

Halloween is coming. 🐙🦈🐟🎃

The big tank at Newport Aquarium. A ray sits in the lower right, while a guitar fish ("shark ray" in local marketing) cruises the lower left. A sand tiger shark swims towards the camera menacingly in the upper right, while a giant octopus statue made of illuminated pumpkins perches on a rock in the background center.

Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 1d

Sisyphean.

Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 2d

One, photodocumentation has progressed a lot since 1890. Glass plates ... shudder. It got done, mind, but the difference in digital photography over the past 20 years has been incredible.

To your previous point though ... you don't. And that's the point.

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Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 2d

That requires staffing with someone who has actual qualifications in relevant fields in a program that serves human need rather than one serving the preconceptions of high school seniors or the whims of fashion amongst the administrators of academe.

Because faculty surrendered everything.

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Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 2d

What has been happening to higher education for the past thirty years has been one bad idea followed by something worse.

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Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 2d

Everyone is replacing min/chrys and petrology courses with one semester of "Earth Materials" if they haven't eliminated geology entirely. Somehow administrators have gotten the idea (probably from consultants) that geology is environmental science is conservation ecology.

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Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 2d

I'm no spring chicken, but I have rarely worked at an institution with anyone else with anything like a background in invertebrate zoology or marine ecology. Anyone else with stratigraphy interests came from a petroleum exploration background.

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Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 2d

Spoken like a naticid!

Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 2d

It knows about Ichthyostega. It knows the Deep Knowledge. Phalange counts are for mudsuckers.

Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 2d

Bear in mind that hiring decisions in a highly competitive market aren't made on the basis of candidate qualifications, but on internal dynamics that are opaque if not actively concealed from the applicants.

It's not you, it's them.

Dave Rodland @daverodland.bsky.social · 2d

I still kind of regret not walking up to say hi the one time I saw Bob at a GSA meeting (over a decade ago). On the one hand, I didn't have any particular reason to do so ... but I didn't have any reason not to, and all we were doing was perusing posters anyway.

But yeah, Heresies held up.