Dave Rodland

@daverodland

Underemployed necromancer. 🧪⚒️🦪🌊☠️ Paleoecology, taphonomy, sed/strat, marine biology, mass extinction ... Earth history in general. Living in the past and talking to dead things since the late Holocene.❤️☮️⚖️

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Dave Rodland@daverodland· 25d

Some graptolites for #FossilFriday ⚒️🧪 While the convention has been to call these a long-extinct group of colonial pelagic hemichordates that died out at the end of the Paleozoic, the living pterobranch Rhabdopleura seems close enough to be considered the last of their kind. Like tuataras.

A black, fine grained mudstone covered with light, bifurcated fossils resembling tuning forks, if the tuning forks had hacksaw teeth.

Dave Rodland@daverodland· 26d

Very nice! And somehow familiar...

Bird footprint, Green River Fm. The toes are widely splayed.

A slab of Green River Formation shale covered with bird footprints, although not as coherent trackways.

Dave Rodland@daverodland· 28d

It's #TrilobiteTuesday and old friends sent me this after a visit to the Field Museum, so I guess I'm obliged to share? Or visit again, whatever. Apparently the Pokémon fossil exhibit is really good too.

Field Museum trilobite display. A circular platform with a glass covered recess holding a diverse assemblage of Paleozoic trilobites. Photo courtesy of the Hrycko family.

Dave Rodland@daverodland· 29d

#MolluskMonday 🧪⚒️🦪 gotta flex some mussels competing for space in the intertidal!

Arcadia Beach intertidal: a closeup tidepool view of mussels and gooseneck barnacles

Dave Rodland@daverodland· 29d

I hear it's International Rock Day, so ... let's rock! 🪨⚒️🧪 This one's from Arcadia Beach in Oregon, a chunk of Columbia River flood basalt that picked up some sedimentary friends along the way.

A chunk of basalt agglomerated with sedimentary xenoliths, Arcadia Beach, Oregon

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jul 12

Home after a long trip cross-country. Scored one dead mouse on arrival, another in the morning, caught and released a third (leather gauntlets are among my best investments), and everyone in the family is on civil speaking terms - so I guess we're still ahead on points?

Selfie of a grizzled bald dude in red plaid in front fo the Peter Iredale. So, you know, a couple chunks of old wreckage way more familiar with encrustation than anyone ever should be.

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jul 10

Celebrating #FossilFriday with a relatively complete fish in diatomite from a grad school field trip to Palos Verde. Cenozoic teleosts are not my specialty, so ID attempts are welcome. 🧪⚒️🐟

Diatomite and fish fossil, from Palos Verdes peninsula, LA

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jul 9

Flex those mussels! 🦪

Mussels, gooseneck barnacles, and an orange sea star. Arcadia Beach, Oregon.

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jul 9

We're clamposting, post a clam. 🦪

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jul 7

Nuculids are a long ranging and morphologically conservative clade (my favorite kind), and occupy an unusual niche for bivalves: deposit feeders. Rather than suspension feeding using their gills for filtration, nuculids sift through surface sediments for food particles using two labial palps.

Two small beige bivalves. Label:
"Nuculopsis ventricosus
Pennsylvanian
Graford Formation
Wise County, Texas"

Small bivalves in a vial. Label:
"Nuculana bellastriata
Wann Fm., Pennsylvanian
Washington County, Oklahoma"

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jul 7

Going old school for #MolluskMonday with one of the earliest diverging bivalve lineages ... yep, we're breaking out the Nucula weapon. 🧪⚒️🦪

Small black mold of a bivalve.
Label:
"Nucula sp.
Ludlowville Fm. - Devonian
Alden, New York"

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jul 6

Not my full #MolluskMonday post, but I really appreciated this shell bed recreation at the Oregon Zoo. 🧪⚒️🦪

A recreation of a bivalve shell concentration deposit in cross-section in the Pacific Coast section of the Oregon Zoo. The concrete wall includes a dense layer of disarticulated shells with a placard describing 'What's in the wall?'

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jul 5

More like 70 million? Not sure, wrong end of Colorado stratigraphy for me.

Skyline Drive, Can̈on City Colorado, looking south. The Dakota hogback represents early Cretaceous beach deposits uplifted along the Front Range.

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jul 4

It's the marine biology signal! 🧪🪼🪸🦑🐌🐡🐙

Tiny crab on a large sea anemone, surrounded by clownfish.

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jul 3

Celebrating #FossilFriday just before the 4th with an all-American classic, the New York state fossil, Eurypterus. 🧪⚒️🦂

Two eurypterid cephalothorax molts
Label:
"Eurypterus cf lacustris
Bertie Ls
Erie Co. NY"

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jul 3

Don't know what you're talking about. I think this was a 3rd, 4th birthday present? Giant Microbes had a Burgess Shale set. The youngest wore her Dinocorn t-shirt to the safari park yesterday. Some of us are doing our best to gender-neutral this nonsense.

The Giant Microbes Burgess Shale plushie collection: Marella, Wiwaxia, Opabinia and a trilobite

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 30

There's a published diagram I love, based on dental wear in Triceratops frills, that suggests Rexy treated it like a pop-top tab - tore it off to get at the neck muscles. Hold on: markwitton-com.blogspot.com/2022/09/tyra...

Mark Witton's artistic reconstruction of T.rex decapitating a Triceratops.

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 29

#MolluskMonday is back with a representative of yhe pen shells, semi-infaunal mussels that live half-buried in soft sediments, point down and anchored by the threadlike byssus. 🧪⚒️🦪

The rigid pen shell, two large but thin shells shaped like a spear point, with a sharply acute angle and radiating ridges terminating in a curved shell margin. Label:
"Atrina rigida
Lassing Park, Florida
Jan 9, 1970"

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 28

Three black cats. 🐈‍⬛️🐈‍⬛️🐈‍⬛️

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 26

There is a decent invert assortment too, but there's more Fridays left in the year ...

A wide assortment of marine invertebrate skeletal materials in a lab display cabinet, including a sectioned Nautilus, corals, asteroids, bivalves and gastropods.

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 26

Good morning #FossilFriday fans and fanatics! 🧪⚒️💀🦣🐊🦖🌴 The vice-dean was kind enough to let me investigate the lab space where I'll be adjuncting this fall. I wanted to see what I had to work with. My friends, I've never seen a intro lab teaching collection like this, across half a dozen schools!

Large model mosasaur skull on a lab mini-fridge. A 3x5 card resting on the skull simply says "Mosasaur"

A lab cabinet stocked with various archosaur replicas: an assortment of dinosaur skulls (including an eagle), an alligator, and replica compression fossils including a recognizable Confuciusornis with long, paired tail feathers.

Classroom display cabinet with various synapsid fossil skull replicas and a comparison set of mammoth snd mastodon molars. A replica trackway ascribed to Dimetrodon rests on top of the cabinet, while its skull shares the top shelf with a dicynodont. The bottom shelf holds a giant beaver skull and one of two Smilodon skulls in the teaching collection.

A lab counter display of Carboniferous plant fossils common to eastern Ohio, and artistic reconstructions of the coal swamp flora.

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 25

Just before the sirens call of the basement beckons ...

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 25

🦀See a crab post a crab🦀 Crustaceans were definitively not a strength of the old teaching collection! 🧪🦀

Fiddler crab in bioplastic. Label:
"Uca sp.
Recent
No locality data known."

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 20

Apparently it's #WorldHorseshoeCrabDay and all I have to celebrate are these lousy photos of ... wait, how many drawers were there??? No, there were more than these ... 🧪

Drawer holding fragments of a large, dark brown horseshoe crab exoskeleton and a specimen tray laden with at least 13 smaller, honey-gold specimens

Horseshoe crab in bioplastic. Label:
"Xiphosura sp.
Recent
Cape Cod, Mass."
The label on the block of bioplastic reads "LIMULUS"

Ventral view of a somewhat damaged small, honey gold specimen of Limulus

Drawer full of fragments of a large, dark brown horseshoe crab exoskeleton and three specimen trays laden with dozens of smaller, pale specimens

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 20

Newport Aquarium in Kentucky has several, including a breeding program.

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 19

Celebrating #FossilFriday with a sneak peak at another hidden gem of a teaching collection in rural Ohio. Never mind this is a shared lab space and the geology classes only go up through Earth History ... I have never seen a vert paleo teaching collection like this, replicas or no. Just a taste. 🧪⚒️

An open display cabinet with five shelves full of paleo replicas and teaching collection specimens, including but not limited to (from top left): nautiloids, brachiopods, a trilobite, latge internal bivalve mold, ammonite, stem tetrapod replcas, turtle and snake skeletons, shark jaws, replicas of bony fish, a coelacanth, Bothriolepis and Dunkleosteus jaw, and giant sloth skull. Geology and Physics lab, Kent State University Tuscarawas branch campus.

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 19

Are crinoids on the menu?

Calyx, arms and pinnules of an unidentified crinoid ascribed to the Pennsylvanian

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 12

Going old school for #FossilFriday with some archaeocyathids. 🧪⚒️🧽 Archaeocyathids were among the first organisms to build reefs in the early Cambrian. Thought to be a variety of sponge, they were among the first clades to disappear in a major extinction. Reefs are always first against the wall.

Gray lime mudstone with rust-orange framework of archeocyathids, roughly conical in shape with two layers separated by septa, like an ice cream cone (old school, not sugar or waffle types). Label:
"Archeocyathids
Ajax limestone - Lower Cambrian
Beltana, Australia."

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 10

That would be this book (and others!), available at all* fine booksellers and libraries** including Columbus' Book Loft, which isn't Powell's but tries! * if they don't, they aren't ** if they don't, request it! Libraries are awesome, librarians awesomer, they are here to Get You That Book!

T. Kingfisher books on the shelf at The Book Loft in German Village, Columbus, Ohio.

Dave Rodland@daverodland· Jun 9

If I had sickle toes, I'd strut like that too. Red legged seriema ❤️