Richard Fallon
@richardfallon
Research Associate in Natural History Humanities at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge ( Author of "Contesting Earth's History", "Reimagining Dinosaurs", and more.
And a Glasgow Style gesso panel by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh: 'Summer'.
Couldn't omit the Scottish graptolites, exhibited with artwork by John Sibbick commissioned by the museum.
Souvenirs of the 1939 World's Fair in New York, including '100 Approved Movie Views'. Well now I need to see the ones that were too extreme to make the cut.
Excursion to National Museums Scotland. Exemplary original label on this aurochs skull: 'Free Church College, Edinburgh / Bos primigenius / "The Unicorn" / The Urus of Caesar'.
An informed and temperate biography, but I think I'll need to search elsewhere for a biography that really gets to grips with Herman Hesse. And/or learn German.
From Hunstanton for #FossilFriday: possibly something else (or nothing), but looking at this helpful site suggests they may be Thalassinoides crustacean burrows? (www.discoveringfossils.co.uk/hunstanton-n...)
Cheers! Plenty to see today, but not usually in the small, loose rocks.
Natalia Ginzburg's Voices of the Evening (1961). Thoughts of one reader, Italo Calvino: 'Never read something so Piedmontese, Piedmontese enough to make you cry. Even the language, Piedmontese as to make you feel Piedmont like a tomb, where whoever enters is condemned never to leave'.
In just over a week, me and my @camglamresearch.bsky.social colleagues Grace Exley and Kimberly Glassman will head to Edinburgh for our #ESHS-HSS panel 'Old Collections, New Stories: Doing Natural History Humanities in Cambridge and Beyond'. I'll be talking about women, illustration, and graptolites
Cambridge snake commuting alongside Trumpington Road. "It's a living", he says.
Astonishingly beautiful and intricate lithographs of trilobites made by Josef Fetters of Prague. From V1 (1852) of Joachim Barrande's Systême Silurien du Centre de la Bohême, copy in the @theul.bsky.social
Victorianists interested in 'imperial Gothic' may have missed this one: a Cambrian lobopodian that sounds rather like Rider Haggard's 'She': Aysheaia pedunculata. Fossil named by C.D. Walcott in 1911 for Aysha Peak in the Canadian Rockies, later altered to 'Ayesha Peak' to recall Haggard's Ayesha.
Spotted a hedgehog friend in the passage near our house last night.
A salamander emerging from the flames above the old fireplace in Anglesey Abbey.
Reading Martin Chuzzlewit for the first time. What's the current Dickensian opinion on this novel? Underappreciated complexity? Deservedly overshadowed? Mainly good when Mrs Gamp is around?
#FossilFriday! Today, the @amnh.org's famous 1915 mounted skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex. One of the many topics in my new @publicdomainrev.bsky.social article, 'Louis Pope Gratacap, A Curator in Lost Worlds'. Tell your friends! publicdomainreview.org/essay/gratac...
I am now, for whatever reason, the owner of King's College Newcastle upon Tyne's copy of Graptolites de Bohême by Joachim Barrande.
I remember thinking these 'handstones' at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien were incredible. Now I see they're viewable on the website. Here are the Crucifixion and George and the Dragon, both atop mines (16th century), plus just a straight-up model of a gold and silver mine (c.1764).
The 1991 GraftonBooks edition of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder: a masterful effort at repackaging Edwardian short stories to appeal to early 90s D&D fans and edgy PC gamers.
Lucky enough last week to see some of the famous Woodwardian Collection @sedgwickmuseum.bsky.social up close, including the fossils originally collected by the painter Agostino Scilla – key to c17th debates about the nature of organic fossils.
A grass snake (or so I assume) swimming its merry way alongside the boardwalk at Wicken Fen.