Jacquelyn Gill

@jacquelyngill

Climate, extinction, and biodiversity scientist at the University of Maine researching Earth’s past for a better future. Writing and podcasting for the planet. Chaotic good professor. She/her.

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Bluesky

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Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· 10d

Some more of his “specimens.”

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· 10d

Hey, geology friends, my nephew would like to know what we’re looking at here. This is from a beach in Maryland.

A light-skinned hand holding a reddish brown flat rock over a sandy beach. The rock has some concentric circles.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· 13d

Behold, our son. He grows stronger every day. We did not plant him. He took over the tomato bed. A true warrior. July 16, July 24, July 26, July 29.

A still-green pumpkin the size of a hand, shown for scale.

A 10” tall baby pumpkin, still green, dangling from a vine on a string trellis.

A large pumpkin, over a foot tall and still green, cupped by a man’s two hands. The man is delighted, making a silly face.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Jun 27

I’m dealing with some frustrating posterior chain/hip/pelvis issues so marching in the local Pride parade wasn’t happening. Instead, Pride has come to my garden.

Red yarrow, an orange coreopsis flower, yellow yarrow, green poppy leaves, and indigo salvia blossoms form a rainbow.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Jun 24

Meet some of our cast of characters: 1) Moss campion, 2) Diapensia, 3) Bog billberry, 4) Bigelow sedge

Tiny pink flowers growing out of a mossy cushion.

Tiny white flowers growing out of a low prostrate shrub.

Tiny fuschia flowers growing out of a low growing woody shrub.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Jun 24

Just seconds later…

Researchers barely visible in the alpine tundra after a cloud rolls in.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Jun 24

Greetings from Mount Washington’s alpine zone, home to the worst recorded weather in the world! We’re here researching the past and future of these tundra relicts dating back to the end of the last glaciation. Alpine plants are both fragile and resilient.

A sweeping photo of rocky alpine vegetation, with three tiny figures in the distance as the clouds roll in.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Jun 17

There’s an air quality alert today in the greater Bangor area, so I went down a rabbit hole this morning to understand why the former waste-to-energy plant in Orrington, Maine is on fire yet again, after a “once in a career” fire to the facility in 2024 and trash pile fires in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

A map of northeastern New England, USA, showing "Good" air quality in green except for a big orange blob over Bangor in central Maine showing "Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups."

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Jun 16

Who knew watching bees drink water was so soothing?

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Jun 16

Our bird bath is also a bee bath!

Seven bees standing around a granite bird bath drinking water.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· May 14

A clip from the comic Saga depicting a sea green, hairless cat (named Lying Cat) with a golden collar and an unamused look saying "Lying."

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· May 1

Fourteen years ago, I snuck into @iceageecologist.bsky.social’s office with help from @sjgoring.bsky.social , and hid dozens of copies of this flyer everywhere I could think of. Drawers, stacks of papers, jacket pockets, cork boards, picture frames… Fourteen years later, he’s still finding them.

A stack of papers and folders. On the top is a quarter page flyer with a young white woman’s face and the words “Number One Grad Student!” printed on it.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· May 1

Ice age megafauna on a blue background with the words “bring back megafauna now.”

A sketch of anomalocaris on red paper with the words “niches be cray.”

A pencil sketch of megafauna with the words “trophic rewilding as a means of revolution” the poster advocates for dismantling colonial imperialism through top-down trophic controls.

A colorful anthropomorphic bee on white paper. The bee is leaning and saying “ya like conservation?”

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· May 1

A sketch of a city with a white bird flying overhead reading “a changing world requires a changing baseline. White ibis in NYC? Deal with it!”

A sketch of a mammoth on white paper reading “Bring back the megafauna to North America” with a sign next to the mammoth reading “Teddy Roosevelt National Park.”

A sketch of an ancient reptile next to a globe of Pangea and a modern reptile next to a modern globe reading “Nothing lasts forever but life stays the same.”

A sketch riffing off the book the Giving Tree about how we wouldn’t be here without plants, so it’s time to give back.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· May 1

A pencil sketch of a mammoth and sabertooth reading “preserve species interactions!”

A colorful drawing of a drip torch and fire reading “change is normal” with fine print advocating for Indigenous burning.

A colorful sketch of Earth ringed with plants on green paper reading “respect plants: we wouldn’t be here without them.”

Line drawings of a mammoth with an X and a pig with a checkmark that reads “stop eating all the megafauna please”

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· May 1

For the last day of my Paleoecology senior capstone, students made PSA-style posters in class. For the prompt, I asked them, “what’s one idea from studying the past that will help us protect the future?” Here’s what they came up with.

A hand-drawn colorful image of a nautilus, feathered dinosaur, and trilobite, reading “Nature is resilient, but we might not be. Protect our place on Earth.”

A pencil sketch of dinosaurs on the left and birds and reptiles on the right, reading “RESILIENCE: a species may die…but their memory lives on.”

A colorful sketch of insects on green paper reading “Protect all species: even the ones you don’t like.”

A black sketch on yellow paper depicting a lion in Europe, camel in North America, and tropical and temperate trees growing together. It reads NICHES: broader than you think!

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Apr 9

The Otters and the seaweed

This is what you need to know:
you need to know that otters wrap themselves
in seaweed so they won’t,

while sleeping at night, float out to sea . . .
Are you imagining this?
Can you see the otters actually doing this?

Does it break your heart a little?
Does it seduce you just a bit
into loving more

this odd hard world?
Oh otters, wrap yourselves tight! And sleep,
exactly like you do, floating but seaweed-held

in our salty living waters! Oh otters,
wrap yourselves tight! And you,
the one who doesn’t, the one who doesn’t

tether himself down right,
we are with you as you float away,
we are with you as you sleep

and lose yourself in the night.

Teddy Macker

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Apr 8

One of my former students took her final project for my field natural history class and turned it into her Honors thesis: a 100% original, hand-drawn field guide to the rocky intertidal! And she got copies printed for her defense!

A spiral bound field guide with a photo of sea star and a sea urchin, written and illustrated by Madelynn DeBest.

An illustrated schematic of the zones of the rocky intertidal and which species live at what depths.

An example page from a spiral bound field guide, open to the entry for bladderwarck, a light green seaweed with little air bladders to help it float.

A field guide entry for an invasive blue crab, showing it to be 9” across.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Mar 29

You know Meganeura, the Carboniferous dragonfly with a 2.5-foot wingspan? All dragonflies spend years of their lives as aquatic larvae before they climb out of the water and emerge as flying adults. Which means...yeah.

A dragonfly larva in a white-skinned hand.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Mar 28

Okay, just so we’re having the same conversation, this is what I’m referring to: a now-deleted post that was going viral that attributes something the interviewer said to Weir.

A screen shot of a skeet about an interview with Andy Weir, indicating Weir is anti-woke.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Mar 19

I went to read the article and of course immediately saw this popup asking me if I wanted to receive notifications. ☠️

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Mar 10

Funny, but it's not real. This is the original.

Donald Trump sitting next to his cronies, who are all wearing the same pair of shoes and navy suits but different colored shirts and ties.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Mar 10

I see we have entered the “Fool’s Spring” phase of March here in New England.

A screenshot of a weather forecast showing today’s high is 69F and later in the week it either be between 14F and 28F.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Mar 10

I would like to interrupt your doomscrolling for an important announcement: This figure from Ellen Dymit et al., 2025, depicts the proportion of vertebrate prey in felid scat, recorded as a Proportion of Occurrence (PoO). 💩

A figure depicting the relative abundance of different prey items among two species of felid (e.g., monkey, small bird, agouti), derived from scat. The x axis is labeled "PoO (%)."

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Feb 3

I’m putting my Rancho Gordo beans to work today in class. My paleoecology students are sampling and identifying “microfossils” (beans) from a time series and plotting relative abundance data. They have to grapple with how to handle data visualization, broken specimens, unknowns, lumping/splitting.

White hexagonal plastic containers each holding a different type of dried bean.

A closeup of a hexagonal white plastic bowl holding a mixture of brown, white, purple, and black beans.

A lineup of white hexagonal containers each holding different amounts of various types of beans. Student papers, tumblers, and other items are seen on a black table.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Jan 26

A moment of calm for your timeline: Neko in her element, and our granite bird bath slowly disappearing. The snow continues to fall just like it has since before life left the oceans to collaborate with rock. The chickadees gossip under the snow-capped yew. Tiny dinosaurs, they are expert survivors.

A 65-pound tan and dark brown GSD/husky mix sitting up to her eyeballs in snow, content.

A GSD/husky lying contentedly surrounded by deep drifts, as snow falls.

The top of a 3’ tall rough granite bird bath disappearing underneath the snow drifts.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Jan 7

I love getting the local paper. There’s no comments section, I get to donate the papers to the herbarium or the parrot rescue after, and you get gems like today’s front-page story.

A photo of a newspaper headline, “World’s oldest known Twinkie then 50 and Blue Hill high school.” The accompanying photo depicts a middle aged woman and man holding a Twinkie in a glass case. The woman is wearing in glasses indoors.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Jan 3

Eris, the Baby Cutes, came into my life on the winter solstice twenty years and thirteen days ago; today, on the perihelion, she has gone to be the sunshine forever. She was so very loved and I am so lucky to have been her mama.

A beautiful grey and white Siamese cat sitting in the sun next to an orange.

A sassy grey and white Siamese cat lounging against a decorative pillow in a “paint me like one of your French ladies” pose.

A petite and clever looking grey and white Siamese cat with her paws tucked under her learning on a pillow as if she was a Khadjit merchant in Skyrim.

A graceful and dainty grey and white Siamese cat running across a hardwood floor towards the camera.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Dec 24

If you’re cold, they’re not cold. Put on more layers and stop whining. Definitely do not bring them inside. If you do bring them in, you’re the meanest dad ever and you’ll be reported to Mom for cruelty and neglect, you monster.

A German shepherd husky mix covered in snow.

Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill· Dec 24

There is an unfortunate error in this newly published @globalchangebio.bsky.social paper. The caption for this image reads "upper panel with dragon icon symbolising all tetrapod" but this is incorrect. That is either a wyvern (with two wings and two legs) or it is not a tetrapod (6 limbs).