Jean-François Cudennec
@limpetnerd
🔬 Limpet scientist (PhD) | Marine biology, paleontology & coastal archaeology 📸 Also nature photographer
The vertical design (D) has a very cool detail : the species’ call is also represented
The bluest blue I’ve ever seen 💙 Gentiana sp. (Brachyphylla maybe?)
Completely obsessed by these euro banknote design proposals 🦉 Ursula, give us the bird money !
This summer the fields turned yellow, the beaches turned green and the only thing left to harvest is what rots in the sand. But Argentina lost, so it’s all good.
Yeah intensive livestock farming may be a monstrosity against animal welfare and both a climatic sanitary plague, but at least coastal ecosystems are devastated.
Limpets graze biofilm using their radula, a tongue like structure covered in tiny teeth, leaving specific markings on the rocks. Modelling works shows that these animals are close to the optimum when it comes to cover a surface by crawling, and without passing two time on the same spot 🦑🌊🌍🌿
End of heatwave has been postponed, again. And another one has been scheduled for the end of July. Dreaming of « The atrium of a Roman house during heavy rain » by Luigi Bazzani, 1882.
Here's a paper (in French) about the ornaments on the kid from La Madeleine cave (Upper Palaeolithic) journals.openedition.org/paleo/1058?l...
Scaphopods were also widely used as ornaments by prehistoric people: with an opening on both ends of the shell, they are particularly convenient to hang on a thread. But since they’re underwater critters, they were usually digged from fossil beds (happened at least in France and N. America)
3/ cold spells would still occur, long enough to allow the establishment of sub-boreal biota, in a sort of glacial/interglacial oscillation, but with a poorly understood kinetic. A truely fascinating formation, were Mediterranean and Subpolar species co-occurs in single fossil beds !
2/ refining our climatic forecasts. My postdoc at @derbyuniearth.bsky.social was specifically about palaeothermometry and palaeobiology of this Crag, and with absolute seawater temperature derived from isotopic data collected on fossils, we showed that even during a « warm » period,
You liked the flash flood ? I hope you’ll like the flash drought
France: just endured two consecutive historic heatwaves, with a third on the way (and it’s not even July yet) French authorities: don’t address the criticism about mass mortality and lack of preparation, but give the green light to a controversial climate-wrecking highway project.
Fresh off the bench: a very cool pot base with classic Bell Beaker decoration, from last year’s excavation on our island shell middens. #PaleoSky 🏺
Also, hovering over a species opens a panel describing its relationships (XX pollinates YY and is eaten by ZZ). There's a lot to be said about gen AI, but I definitely wouldn't have managed to do this on my free time, with my poor coding skills, and surely not in half an hour or so.
As an amateur naturalist, I listed the species found in my area and asked Claude to build a 3D model of the interactions between them. The ecosystem is nicely structured around the two large green balls (oak and beech). It looks messy, but you can navigate through it and add taxa manually.
The sea surface temperature in the Bay of Brest with see a 10°C increase in just one week. The usual summer temperature maximum is somewhere around 20 °C, and is normally reached in August. One of the most studied coastal ecosystem in the world, turned into a hot marine stew. shorturl.at/Sg8ss
Having a cnidarian (Velella velella, the purple sail) using the winds to sail across the ocean is already cool, but TIL that this species has different morphs to catch the dominant winds (east/west) in the Pacific Ocean. (Also, have you seen these growth rings ?? 👀)
My daughter, 5yo, to the other kids at the playground : « so, the radula is like a tongue for the snails, but covered in teeth ! »
The area alone is worth the visit. Incredibly powerful environment. The fossil are sitting just above the waves, and yesterday’s weather wasn’t even that bad according to our guide…
Yesterday we wandered in the « Eastern hyper-oceanic barrens ecoregion » of Newfoundland to walk in socks on the oldest animal ever known (Ediacaran fauna, Avalonian period) at Mistaken Point. And this Beothukis ? The holotype, still in situ. What a day ! #PaleoSky ⚒️