Welcome to this little fungus-infested blog where I share with you some very moldy pictures I've taken in the lab, but mostly science-related reblogs. I have a PhD in food science and wrote my dissertation on the fungal ecology of dried fruits.
She is not directly paid for her work to vet papers, she has been hit with legal action & death threats by scientists who hate that she's exposing them and their financial fraud, and she keeps at it every single day, combing through thousands of papers to make science more fair. Please consider supporting her!
I loove artificial food colors and flavors. You're telling me I can add this Mysterious Powder™ to my drinks and make them taste like the lemon that never was? This little extract tastes like an extinct species of banana. This other one tastes like the impression of a watermelon from someone who has maybe seen a watermelon in a painting once. Here, add this liquid essence of smoke to your hamburger. It will maybe give you cancer, though. Just maybe. We're not sure yet, ok? Don't question it! Just eat the eldritch gummy that tastes like the concept of a rainbow. It's (probably) completely safe. Maybe.
Hey. Stop for a second. Take this moment to appreciate that you don't have to write a paper right now. No one is asking you to write a paper. You don't have to think about the paper or plan your time around the paper. You have the freedom to think about whatever you want. Everything is going to be okay. At least you don't have to write a paper right now
In an effort to modernize the principles and empirical procedures of examining phenomena and advancing humanity’s collective knowledge, the International Council for Science announced Thursday the addition of a “Seek Funding” step to the scientific method. “After making an observation and forming a hypothesis as usual, the new third step of the scientific method will now require researchers to embark upon an exhaustive search for corporate or government financing,” said the group’s president, Gordon McBean, adding that the new stage of the process, which will be implemented across every scientific discipline, also entails compiling and forwarding grant proposals to hundreds of highly competitive funding sources.
Oh BOY! Story time! All the way back in 2016, on our way back from Munich for a EAVP meeting Sven Sachs got a mail by Georg Göltz, attached were some first images of an incredible specimen. That evening we went over the material again and again...
I remember saying, "well, that looks like a large owl feather" and oh boy... Some time after Sven got Johan Lindgren and Dean Lomax on board who likewise recognized the importance of the fossil and made it happen that all the necessary tests were done to ensure that...
We would get as much information out of the specimen as possible! Now, quite a few years later we can finally show what has been brewing behind the academic curtains for a while.
Temnodontosaurus is a ichthyosaur taxon that is nearly as old of Paleontology itself, and yet, after more than 200 years of research history new details still reveal themselves. This flipper that Georg Göltz found not only showed the flipper outline that was unexpected...
But also revealed completely novel structures that have never been found in a living or extinct animal. Already, kind of, known where the parallel skin grooves that are very visible, even under normal light, but more important are the tiny, light structures on the back of the fin...
These are not bony but cartilaginous in nature and get the new name, chondroderms. These tiny spikes, embedded in the skin, supported a serrated trailing edge that stretched over nearly the full length of the flipper. As closer inspection revealed that these weren't just...
...impressions but that large portions of the skin structure were preserved. Which this wealth of data the researchers were able to do something pretty cool, they could build a digital model of a Temnodontosaurus flipper and test it's properties.
While not that efficient in improving the hydrodynamic properties these structures seem to reduce noise, similar to owl feathers! A puzzle piece that was so far completely absent from any considerations about the livestyle of these early Jurassic predators!
However this fits well to what we already knew. Large eyes, long but robust jaws and stomach content that consists of other fast prey like belemnites and other ichthyosaurs speak for a ambush predator, in this case a silent one.
I became part of this project first as a interested observer but only a few month before it went into review Johan asked me to make some artwork of the press release. As I had a rather tricky perspective in mind I actually build for this a model of Temnodontosaurus.
Eventually a took a shot of the model in a way that satisfied me and I went to finish it digitally. We decided to show it swimming into a swarm of belemnites. The specimen has a small flipper injury to show of better that structure of the fin.
There is much more to say about this fossil but thankfully the paper, published in Nature, is OPEN ACCESS! have a look!
Analysis of a fossilized front flipper of the Jurassic ichthyosaur Temnodontosaurus that preserves details of soft tissue indicates the pres
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