Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
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ichnologist.bsky.social
Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
@ichnologist.bsky.social
7.5K followers 800 following 2.7K posts
Traces & trace fossils. Wrote 'Life Sculpted' (2023), 'Dinosaurs Without Bones' (2014), 'The Evolution Underground' (2017), & more. Hubby, Trekkie, reading, cooking, craft-beer imbibing, childless cat dude, 🚫AI. 🧪🐾🦖🦕🪨⚒️🌍📚✍️ 🖖 https://ajmartinauthor.com
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ichnologist.bsky.social
Anthony (Tony) J. Martin @ichnologist.bsky.social · Aug 21
Hello Bluesky science appreciators! I'm a geologist, paleontologist, & (most importantly) an ichnologist, which means I study modern traces (tracks, burrows, etc.) & trace fossils. I teach undergrad students in environmental sciences, write books about ichnology, & do lots of public outreach. 🧪🪨⚒️🐾🦕🦖
Alligator tracks on a beach, showing the direction of movement by a large alligator from the lower part of the beach and up to its dunes, with a prominent sinuous tail drag in its middle and front-rear track pairs on either side. I am squatting to the left of the tracks, wearing a hat, sunglasses, shirt, shorts, and sandals. Tracks were on Sapelo Island, Georgia (USA). Cover of my latest book LIFE SCULPTED (2023, U. of Chicago Press), with black background and cut section of a grayish tree trunk as its central image, in which the trunk has many borings made by insects and fungi. The book title and subtitle at the top of the cover says, "LIFE SCULPTED: Tales of the Animals, Plants, and Fungi that Drill, Break, and Scrape to Shape the Earth," and my author name (Anthony J. Martin) is in the lower right corner. Sauropod dinosaur tracks evident as semi-circular depressions in a slanted sandstone surface, with me wearing a broad-brimmed hat while sitting next to the tracks on that surface and facing downslope. Tracks were in a Jurassic formation in southern Portugal. Rear view of a camera crew (two people) filming me in the atrium of Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta, GA (USA), with me sitting and partial views of dinosaur skeletons in the background, which are replicas of Argentinosaurus (left) and Gigantosaurus (right), dinosaurs that lived in what is now Argentina about 100 million years ago.
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
alexwild.bsky.social
Tired: Everything evolves to be a crab.

Wired: Everything evolves to eat ants.
Mammals have evolved into ant eaters 12 times since the dinosaur age, study finds
Mammals have developed some unusual eating habits over the past 100 million years, but a new study has uncovered the surprising lengths to which some have gone to satisfy one of the more peculiar—a ta...
phys.org
January 7, 2026 at 1:13 AM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
gregpriest.bsky.social
OTD in 1912, Alfred Wegener delivered a lecture propounding the theory that our modern continents were formed by the splitting and drifting apart of an ancient supercontinent, which he named Pangea.

Due to his failure to offer a plausible mechanism, he was widely ridiculed.

🧠🗃️⚒️ 🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci
Wegener's (1915) depiction of the breakup of Pangaea. (a) the Carboniferous, (b) the Eocene, (c) today.
January 6, 2026 at 4:56 PM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
extinctfineart.bsky.social
February 11 is the "International Day of Women* in STEM". For an online panel discussion suitable for attendees in the Eastern Hemisphere, I am looking for panellists currently residing in Asia/Australia to take part in a panel discussion.

#paleoart #SciComm #WomenInSTEM #Paleontology #OnlineEvent
January 7, 2026 at 11:28 AM
ichnologist.bsky.social
Diprotodon and Genyornis from the Pleistocene of Australia will return in AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY.
Skeletal mounts of the world's largest marsupial, Diprotodon, and the large flightless bird Genyornis, both from the Pleistocene Epoch of Australia; mounts on display at Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.
January 7, 2026 at 10:35 AM
ichnologist.bsky.social
Good morning, buenas dias, guten morgen, bonjour, (صباح الخير), & to all others in your respective time zones from Georgia USA. Up far too early for a medical appointment (nothing serious), so thought I'd share a Jekyll Island beach with its gorgeous ripples at low tide, from November 2025.
Beach at low tide with dark gray rippled sand in the foreground, a smooth patch of sand in the background, with the ocean and an orange-yello-blue gradation from dawn light, Jekyll Island, Georgia USA.
January 7, 2026 at 9:49 AM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
jamesgilbertmr.bsky.social
Rail tracks…
January 7, 2026 at 8:29 AM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
pegyaco.bsky.social
I love the idea of "curious" ammonites, roaming the K/Pg seas!

Against all odds, a curious sea creature survived the dino-killing asteroid | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...
Against all odds, a curious sea creature survived the dino-killing asteroid
Coil-shelled mollusks called ammonites staved off extinction for thousands of years
www.science.org
January 6, 2026 at 10:40 PM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
rachelignotofsky.bsky.social
Whose New Year's resolution was visit more museums? (mine was!)

Illustration from my new book: Dinosaurs 🦕 Link to grab your copy here: a.co/d/cK0pPnK

#dinosaurs #fossiladdict #paleoart #sciart #evolution
January 6, 2026 at 10:03 PM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
merriam-webster.com
peek = 🫣

peak = 🗻

pique = 👀
January 5, 2026 at 8:35 PM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
nocontexttrek1.bsky.social
For no reason whatsoever I'm sure today we have the movie cover art for the film Star Trek: Insurrection. There's a large planet across the lower half of the picture as if we're in orbit above and we see the USS Enterprise flying away from us at warp towards open space. There's a large menacing face looking down at the starship and planet, cloaked in red beams of light. Across the top reads, "INSURRECTION."
January 6, 2026 at 2:26 PM
ichnologist.bsky.social
Enchanting video (& soundtrack!) of a capybara swimming along an underwater sandy-gravelly bottom that also shows unusually long distances between its footfalls. If preserved in the fossil record, this trackway might be interpreted as "very fast running" instead of "leisurely swimming." 🧪🐾
c0nc0rdance.bsky.social c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 23h
I need a mood booster, let's talk about capybaras.

Here's a capy demonstrating one of MANY ways they can move through the water: running along the bottom.

They're 'semi-aquatic' mammals, just like hippos, seals & beavers. They LOVE water.

(📷: Fernando Maidana)
January 6, 2026 at 2:41 PM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
alexwild.bsky.social
Great new paper!

Many stinging wasps, bees, and ants have controlled the sex of their developing eggs for millions of year using an ancient segment of their genome- always the same segment- but what's weird is, *the exact DNA sequence of that segment doesn't seem to matter*.
hugodarras.bsky.social Hugo Darras @hugodarras.bsky.social · 1d
New work from @miyapan.bsky.social and our team, bringing ant, bee, and wasp labs together. @chuanxinyu.bsky.social shows that the ANTSR locus we discovered in ants has determined sex for 150+ My across bees and stinging wasps 🐜🐝, despite virtually no sequence conservation 😮 doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
January 6, 2026 at 3:11 AM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
maibached.bsky.social
So little was known 18 years ago when I started researching climate comms. I'm blown away by how much we now know. This study, led by the incomparable Jan Voelkel with his all-star band, and released today in @natclimate.nature.com confirms that many distinct message strategies can work...
A registered report megastudy on the persuasiveness of the most-cited climate messages - Nature Climate Change
How to effectively communicate climate change to the public has long been studied and debated. Through a registered report megastudy, researchers tested the ten most-cited climate change messaging str...
www.nature.com
January 6, 2026 at 12:17 AM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
tweetisaurus.bsky.social
On this cold cold January morning, warm your cockles by listening to the second part of our chat with the one-and-only @stevebrusatte.bsky.social here: fossils.libsyn.com/19-dinosaurs... or wherever you get your podcasts #FossilFiles @thefossilfiles.bsky.social
The Fossil Files: 19. Dinosaurs were doing fine (before the asteroid), with Steve Brusatte. part 2
Part 2: Around 66 million years ago an enormous asteroid barrelled into the earth and wiped out  ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs*. Debate has raged back and forth as to whether the dinosa...
fossils.libsyn.com
January 6, 2026 at 11:20 AM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
dremmanicholls.bsky.social
We have di-snow-saurs at @morethanadodo.bsky.social!

❄️ ⛄️ 🦖

#dinosaur #snow #OxfordUniversityMuseumofNaturalHistory @ox.ac.uk
January 6, 2026 at 11:44 AM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
mattzilla85.bsky.social
FIRST ART OF 2026! Between the recent KS for the Last Dinosaur figure from @seismictoys.bsky.social and finally reading Dinosaur Sanctuary by Itaru Kinoshita, I got inspired to make this art based on the classic Japanese/American co-production THE LAST DINOSAUR aka 極底探険船ポーラーボーラ!
January 5, 2026 at 11:40 PM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
theodoragoss.bsky.social
The secret to writing with AI: don’t.
January 5, 2026 at 8:38 PM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
meghanbartels.bsky.social
Just a little woodpecker science if today is A Lot for you 🧪 🪶
January 5, 2026 at 8:54 PM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
drvanessapirotta.bsky.social
It’s simple. Many of us share #science. Please join up.

go.bsky.app/H3qcvgP

Please add your name below and expertise and you’ll be added!

#scientistswhocommunicatescience #scicomm #womeninsciencw
December 2, 2024 at 2:07 AM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
tanyagoldman.bsky.social
Saved this post from @nnedi.bsky.social from June in my camera roll. Still tracks; feel like it always will… 🫠
January 5, 2026 at 8:02 PM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
thirstygecko.bsky.social
The deadline for graduate student applications for paleoCAMP 2026 (Paleoclimate Training in Climate Archives, Models, and Proxies) summer school is this Friday, January 9th! paleoCAMP is completely free for all students selected to attend paleoclimate.camp/apply
Application — paleoCAMP
paleoclimate.camp
January 5, 2026 at 6:48 PM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
fieseler.bsky.social
Twice as old as the dinosaurs, horseshoe crabs have been around for 450 million years. 🦖

But their numbers plummeted 70% in recent decades as Big Pharma harvested their blood for drug safety testing. Now, 25 groups are suing to get them protections.👇

www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/inve...
www.biologicaldiversity.org
January 5, 2026 at 6:35 PM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
obialik.bsky.social
Anyone who says scientists aren't creatives either has a very poor and archaic opinion of people in creative fields or has no sense of what a scientist's work actually entails.
January 5, 2026 at 6:15 PM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
melissasevigny.bsky.social
What a pleasure it was to write the epic story of plate tectonics - and the woman who brought the theory from the ocean to the land - with the fabulous editors at @highcountrynews.org. Give a read! #womeninstem #science #geology #scicomm
highcountrynews.org High Country News @highcountrynews.org · 1d
The discovery that the continents are in continuous motion is fairly recent—dating back only to the late 1960s — and one woman was responsible for decoding what it meant for California and much of the West Coast.

buff.ly/2vAwspH
Drifters and the introduction of plate tectonics - High Country News
How the San Andreas fault and Tanya Atwater’s theory changed geology.
www.hcn.org
January 5, 2026 at 5:43 PM
Reposted by Anthony (Tony) J. Martin
peterbrannen.bsky.social
Made a pilgrimage to 2 ghosts of sea level past & future in Florida, from last time global temp was similar to today 120,000 years ago: an outcrop of oolite in Miami from when it was a sandy shoal under the waves, and in Windley Key a fossil coral reef that now ominously sits 20 feet above sea level
an outcrop of Miami oolite under an overpass in Brickell The Windley Key Fossil Reef, an old limestone quarry that provides a cross-section of a coral reef from 120,000 years ago
January 5, 2026 at 5:35 PM