Dr Caitlin Syme
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taphovenatrix.bsky.social
Dr Caitlin Syme
@taphovenatrix.bsky.social
1.2K followers 400 following 39 posts
Collection Manager Geosciences at the Queensland Museum 🦕 Palaeontologist & video gamer with the Palaeocast Gaming Network. Living on unceded lands of Turrbal/Yuggera Nations. She/her. Views are my own.
Posts Replies Media Videos
taphovenatrix.bsky.social
So many extinct Australasian taxa in the new Prehistoric Planet 3 trailer, including Thylacoleo as a 'dropbear'! Let the ambush predator arguments begin ⚒️🧪🦴
#palaeontology #PrehistoricPlanetIceAge #fossils
An orange-brown, stripey Thylacoleo (an extinct marsupial "lion") leaping down from a gum tree, with its arms and claws outstretched, as if to drop down on top of its unsuspecting prey.
November 7, 2025 at 9:13 AM
Reposted by Dr Caitlin Syme
pantmonger.bsky.social
Just got my new drivers license and the picture is so washed out I'm sure the DMV staff member must be dabbling in spirit photography.
September 3, 2025 at 3:01 AM
taphovenatrix.bsky.social
Hearing about the Victorian meteorite everyone's hunting for inspired me to delve into the Queensland Museum collections and examine the Tenham Meteorite that lit up Queensland's skies in 1879. ☄️
Read more here → bit.ly/4fOJDlh

#QMKurilpa #QldMuseum #Meteorites #TenhamMeteorite #DinosUnearthed
🧪⚒️☄️
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August 24, 2025 at 5:07 AM
taphovenatrix.bsky.social
Had an awesome time at Chinchilla Fossil Finders this past weekend! The Queensland Museum put on an activity day where the community helped sieve for microfossils and learn about Pliocene megafauna. The local TV network covered it too ⚒️🦴
#palaeontology #fossils
www.facebook.com/share/v/1B3s...
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August 6, 2025 at 11:50 PM
Reposted by Dr Caitlin Syme
hhackenbecker.bsky.social
Tune in to the original #MoonDay by visiting apolloinrealtime.org/11/
Apollo 11 in Real Time
A real-time interactive journey through the first landing on the Moon. Relive every moment as it occurred in 1969.
apolloinrealtime.org
July 20, 2025 at 1:30 AM
Reposted by Dr Caitlin Syme
doublebeam.bsky.social
OK…I know. This is a preprint. Not peer-reviewed/not the final version/all of that & etc. So, we shouldn’t be discussing any of the science or results at-large…

(/many)
April 17, 2025 at 5:35 PM
Reposted by Dr Caitlin Syme
jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social
alright i have my laptop, guess i'm livetweeting the dire wolf preprint.

so a quick reminder: this is not yet peer-reviewed, so there's some different expectations re: quality.

also let's be clear, i'm a hella biased reader, bc i don't trust the hype they're courting
jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social · Apr 12
Briefly read through this and...hmm. I have thoughts that may merit a deeper dive.

One big concern: while their reference method seems reasonable for research uses, I'm thinking that if you want to claim you're cloning one, I'm sorry but you've actually gotta de novo that.
gcbias.bsky.social Graham Coop @gcbias.bsky.social · Apr 11
Dire wolf genomes from Colossal.

bsky.app/profile/bior...
April 12, 2025 at 12:37 AM
Reposted by Dr Caitlin Syme
tarpits.org
🐾 Are #direwolves alive again?

Dr. Mairin Balisi (Augustyn Family Curator at @alfpaleo.bsky.social and Research Associate at the #TarPits) has studied dire wolves for over 15 years and published numerous papers. Listen as she shares insight about the Ice Age Angeleno.

youtube.com/shorts/8KAYl...
Are Dire Wolves Alive Again? #TarPits #DireWolves #Paleontology #Shorts
YouTube video by La Brea Tar Pits and Museum
youtube.com
April 15, 2025 at 12:08 AM
taphovenatrix.bsky.social
A new therizinosaur just dropped! This group is already pretty bizarre, but Duonychus tsogtbaatari joins the two-fingered theropod club, with 2 giant claws instead of the usual 3, which seem to have been pretty dexterous for grasping plants!
🦖🧪⚒️
www.newscientist.com/article/2473...
Two-fingered dinosaur used its enormous claws to eat leaves
A dinosaur fossil discovered in Mongolia boasts the largest ever complete claw, but the herbivorous species only used it to grasp vegetation
www.newscientist.com
March 27, 2025 at 1:45 AM
taphovenatrix.bsky.social
I managed to get my video done before cyclone Alfred hits - just a few hours until pandemonium in the city itself. Until then, enjoy my #FossilFriday review of Two Point Museum (as a palaeo who works at a museum!)

youtu.be/OaOG8LM_AU4?...

@twopointstudios.bsky.social
⚒️🧪🎮🦖
IT'S FINALLY HERE! Real Palaeontologist Plays TWO POINT MUSEUM!
YouTube video by Palaeocast Gaming Network
youtu.be
March 7, 2025 at 11:32 AM
taphovenatrix.bsky.social
Trying to focus on work and planning to film a video for the YouTube channel I’m part of, but Alfred is making me anxious:
A weather map in showing wind speed and direction over Australia (with blue lines for slow wind and light green/yellow for fast wind) - a large green and yellow swirl indicating a cyclone can be seen on the east coast of Australia near Brisbane
March 5, 2025 at 11:44 PM
Reposted by Dr Caitlin Syme
thepalass.bsky.social
Ecosystem engineers alter the evolution of seed size by impacting fertility and the understory light environment doi.org/10.1111/pala... @datadryad.bsky.social #FossilFriday
Plot of time against relative size (of seeds and animals). Green area on left represents the Cretaceous. Light competition for saplings increased leading to the evolution of large seeds able to establish taller saplings before relying on photosynthesis for energy (orange curve). Feeding on large fruit/seeds opened the niche for large mammal evolution (blue curve). When animals reach a particular herbivore size (HS1), animal disturbance leads to decreased light competition driving a decrease in seed size. When megafauna disturbance decreased to a certain level, the herbivore size will show a local minimum (HS2) after which a dynamic equilibrium state with smaller fluctuations in seed size will establish in this model. http://phylopic.org: triceratops, elephant (CC0 1.0); shrew (Sarah Werning; CC BY 3.0); https://thenounproject.com: meteor (Alex Muravev), small, intermediate and large seed icons (Soetarman Atmodjo, ji-na seo and RoyyanWijaya, respectively), all CC BY-3.0. A herd of the Jurassic sauropod dinosaur Camarasaurus walks through a mostly coniferous floodplain forest in what will one day be Utah. Such large dinosaurs transform the landscape with their massive footfalls and bodies, damaging trees and increasing light levels for the saplings on the forest floor. Image credit Victor O. Leshyk. http://www.victorleshyk.com/
February 28, 2025 at 6:06 PM
Reposted by Dr Caitlin Syme
nhmlibraryarchives.bsky.social
George B. Sowerby (1812-1884) produced these beautiful watercolour drawings of fossil remains from the Cheltenham area about 1840.

View all 148 watercolours via our #DigitisedCollections https://buff.ly/4aPzanv
#FossilFriday

#Palaeontology #SpecialCollections #Fossils
A watercolour drawing of a nautilus fossil. It is cream in colour. A watercolour drawing of an ammonite, it is brown in colour. A watercolour drawing of an ammonite, it is grey and cream in colour.
January 31, 2025 at 11:15 AM
taphovenatrix.bsky.social
"The Curator's Egg" - a book I found in a second-hand bookshop the other day - has some beautiful insights into the everpresent problems faced by museums.
In 1793, Jean-Jaques David said of the Louvre, "The museum is not supposed to be a vain assemblage of frivolous luxury objects (cont...)
A photo of a front cover of the book "The Curator's Egg: The evolution of the museum concept from the French Revolution to the present day" by Karsten Schubert
January 31, 2025 at 1:20 PM
taphovenatrix.bsky.social
I spent my #FossilFriday cataloguing Queensland's newest fossil species - Palaeospondylus australis!

Palaeospondylus had previously only been found in Scotland, so this new Early Devonian (late Emsian) species is a fascinating find!
academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-...
#palaeontology #fossils 🧪⚒️
A 3D braincase of the early jawed vertebrate Palaeospondylus from Australia
This paper describes a new Australian species of an enigmatic 400-million-year-old fossil vertebrate, Palaeospondylus, previously only known from Scotland.
academic.oup.com
January 24, 2025 at 8:25 AM
Reposted by Dr Caitlin Syme
dennish.bsky.social
A favourite page of mine from Johs. Gessner's "Museum" for this #FossilFriday - pieces of amber with inclusions on the page with fossil insects from his collection. They look like you could pick them up off the page 💚(ZBZ NFF4, mid-1700s) #SciArt #EarlyModern #InverteFest
A large, old book filled with pasted-in sheets with paintings of objects from Gessner's natural history collection. It is opened on a page with fossil insects. Close-up of the centre of the page, with a section of nine pieces of amber - all having one or more tiny insects within. A very close-up image of two of the amber pieces. Barely a few cm large, we can identify an ant in the upper piece, and a fly or a mosquito in the lower piece.
December 27, 2024 at 3:58 PM
taphovenatrix.bsky.social
December 22, 2024 at 9:34 AM
taphovenatrix.bsky.social
This #FossilFriday, watch the SUPRISINGLY addictive CREATURES OF WAR playthrough from the Palaeocast Gaming Channel!
I play as a very manly soldier dude with a deep voice sprinting at an ungodly speed around an island while being chased by dinosaurs. It's actually quite fun!
youtu.be/x0An8Tbf2gg
Real Palaeontologist Plays the SUPRISINGLY addictive CREATURES OF WAR
YouTube video by Palaeocast Gaming Network
youtu.be
December 6, 2024 at 1:02 PM
Reposted by Dr Caitlin Syme
richardsever.bsky.social
A piece of history: the first science journal
December 2, 2024 at 10:55 PM
taphovenatrix.bsky.social
This is an absolutely fascinating and beautiful animation & summary of the findings from El Albani et al 2024 - Rapid volcanic ash entombment reveals the 3D anatomy of Cambrian trilobites 👇
December 1, 2024 at 11:19 PM
Reposted by Dr Caitlin Syme
joshlukedavis.com
I've updated this starter pack for all interested!

Now bursting with over 100 natural history museum related accounts 🎉🌱🦆🙌
go.bsky.app/NtdUnyF
November 25, 2024 at 6:15 PM
Reposted by Dr Caitlin Syme
brianftang.bsky.social
How to turn off MS Word scraping your writing to train its AI medium.com/illumination...
MS Word is Using You to Train AI
How to turn off AI-scraping from your Word documents
medium.com
November 18, 2024 at 12:27 PM
Reposted by Dr Caitlin Syme
tanyaha.bsky.social
Like ‘old Twitter’: The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky

www.science.org/content/arti...
Like ‘old Twitter’: The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky
After recent changes to Elon Musk’s X, a gradual migration turns into a stampede
www.science.org
November 22, 2024 at 2:49 AM
taphovenatrix.bsky.social
For #FossilFriday, here’s something fun I found in the collection - GSQF13122, a little pyritised actinopterygian smack bang in the middle of a drill core sample through the Allaru Mudstone, from 615m underground! How lucky is that?

🧪⚒️
November 22, 2024 at 12:10 PM
taphovenatrix.bsky.social
Real palaeontologist and offshore oil rig worker Dave Marshall has just played Still Wakes the Deep - a horror game set on an oil rig…

Dave talks about what life is really like offshore and the important role that palaeontologists play in the safe extraction of oil and gas.

🧪 ⚒️ 🎮 #paleontology
PALAEONTOLOGIST PLAYS: Still Wakes the Deep #1
YouTube video by Palaeocast Gaming Network
https://youtu.be/W30_PrARGBQ?si…
November 22, 2024 at 5:51 AM