scicomm

118d

Fresh in for #FossilFriday, a new review! In Search of Sea Dragons is an engrossing tale of fossils and obsession.

https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2026/05/15/book-review-in-search-of-sea-dragons-a-fossil-hunters-odyssey/

#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Fossils #Paleontology #Palaeontology #Scicomm @bookstodon

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117d

This week's #NewBooks at the library: Three more books from our January clearance sale
- Jellyfish Age Backwards: Nature's Secrets to Longevity by Nicklas Brendborg, published by Hodder & Stoughton.
- Ancestors in Evolutionary Biology: Linear Thinking about Branching Trees, a more technical volume by Ronald A Jenner, published by Cambridge University Press as part of their series of Systematics Association Special Volumes (@SystAssn).
- #Acrocanthosaurus Inside and Out by Kenneth Carpenter, published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

#Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #MolecularBiology #EvolutionaryBiology #Evolution #Paleontology #Palaeontology #Fossils #Dinosaurs @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books.

On the left, Jellyfish Age Backwards, showing a black hardback with a rainbow-coloured drawing of the outline of a jellyfish.

In the middle, Ancestors in Evolutionary Biology, showing a hardback with a colour photo of the moss-draped gnarly oak trees of Wistman's Wood in Dartmoor National Park, South West England, on a foggy day.

On the right, Acrocanthosaurus Inside and Out, showing a black hardback with a colour photo of the prepared fossil skull of a carnivorous dinosaur.

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110d

This week's #NewBooks at the library: Who is excited about the next few books he will be reviewing?

- After an impressive debut, I am looking forward to reading Cal Flyn's second book, The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness, published by HarperCollins.

- Time for another deep dive into the history of my favourite discipline, #EvolutionaryBiology. I really enjoyed Costa's annotated version of Wallace's notebook, and am very excited about delving into this annotated version of #CharlesDarwin's The Descent of Man, beautifully published here by @princetonupress. Expect me to go dark for a while, it's over 760 pages!

- And for context, I will be adding a review of Jeremy DeSilva's A Most Interesting Problem: What #Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong about #HumanEvolution, published a few years back, also by Princeton.

#Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #Evolution #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing upright on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books.

On the left, The Savage Landscape, showing a hardback with a top-down aerial colour photo, likely shot with a drone, of a snow-covered landscape. A black tarmac road runs straight up from bottom to top. Halfway up the cover, red-hot glowing lava is covering the landscape.

In the middle, The Descent of Man, showing a landscape-format white hardback. The bottom half is covered by a fan-shaped collection of bird feathers from an argus pheasant. The feathers are brown and tan and show speckles. The left half of the fan shows male feathers, recognisable by eye-like circles running down the length of each feather, right next to the vane. The photo is by Kyle Black and called Argus Volans.

On the right, A Most Interesting Problem, showing a cream-coloured hardback with two drawings placed on either side of the title and subtitle. To the left, a skeleton of a chimpanzee rendered in yellow; to the right, a side-on view of a human skull rendered in green.

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33d

This week's #NewBooks at the library:
- Another second-hand volume to my growing collection of The Correspondence of #CharlesDarwin, this one Volume 26: 1878, published by Cambridge University Press.
- #Warhammer: The Art of #GamesWorkshop, a rather rare exhibition catalogue of grimdark artwork that I bought via eBay.
- I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in #NaturalHistory, the final of the essay bundles from #StephenJayGould, published by Harmony Books.

#Books #Bookstodon #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Evolution #EvolutionaryBiology #Scicomm @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books and part of the beech-coloured laminate floor.

On the left, standing up, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 26: 1878, showing a thick moss-green hardback with black and white lettering.

In the middle, lying down, Warhammer: The Art of Games Workshop, showing a slim paperback volume with a parchment-coloured cover showing a man in a large blue metal armoured exo-suit with an oversized red-and-gold metal glove and a gun in the other hand (or in the lingo of Games Workshop, a Space Marine with a power fist). Several parchment seals hang from the suit. The figure is walking towards the viewer. The piece is by Karl Kopinski and is called "Commander Cantor"

On the right, standing up, I Have Landed, showing a white hardback with a large blue rectangle on the cover. Along the bottom, several cartoonesque human figures trot and cavort across the cover from right to left. They are drawn in green, orange, blue, and yellow outlines.

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82d

This week's #NewBooks at the library:
- The last of the books from the NHBS January sale: Michael Ruse's The #Philosophy of Human #Evolution, published by Cambridge University Press
- A lovely version of Humphrey Carpenter's highly praised J. R. R. #Tolkien: A Biography, published by HarperCollins
- A second-hand copy of Ant Ecology, published by Oxford University Press

#HumanEvolution #Anthropology #Fantasy #LOTR #LordOfTheRings #Myrmecology #Ecology #Insects #Entomology #Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm @bookstodon

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75d

Scales of the Universe:

Out Sun is five billion years old and will live another five billion.

A star with ten times the mass, lives some twenty million years, larger stars have an even shirter lifetime.

A star with half the mass of the Sun will live hundred billion years. Our universe is 13.7 billion years old -- the oldest low mass stars are not even past their teenage years yet.

#VicisAstro #astrodon #SciComm #astrophysics #astronomy

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75d

This week's #NewBooks at the library:
- I found a second-hand copy of Voyage of the Basilisk: A Memoir by Lady Trent, written by Marie Brennan (@swan_tower) and published by Tor Books. This is book 3 in a #Fantasy series I have been eyeing up for some time now. I will not lie that the striking covers grabbed my attention.
- Taschen had a sale some time ago, allowing me to finally buy a volume I have long coveted: the collected works of #HRGiger. When it comes to their art collections, I always end up choosing their XXL versions. Expensive? Yes. But it's a "go big or go home" choice for me.
- A lovely birthday gift from a family member: the latest book by the incomparable Dutch biologist Midas Dekkers, Het Menselijk Tekort, published by Atlas Contact.

#Books #Bookstodon #Dragons #HumanEvolution #Anthropology #Scicomm @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing upright on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books and part of the beech-coloured laminate floor.

On the left, Voyage of the Basilisk: A Memoir by Lady Trent, showing a white hardback with a colour illustration of a marine dragon swimming in the sea, offering a view of both its neck and head above water, and its body below the waterline. Several other marine critters swim around it for size comparison, including a shark, a humpback whale, and a giant squid.

In the middle, a very large black hardback showing some of HR Giger's disturbing artwork. This is Dark Star, showing a decapitated female head, merging into a stack of skulls, insectoid limbs, and other mechanical and biological parts, all jacked up to a frame via hoses and wires. She is flanked by two figures that consist of columns of unholy amalgamations of skulls, limbs, ribcages, and other unrecognisable body parts. The whole is executed in his signature colour scheme of pallid flesh and dark grey.

On the right, Het Menselijk Tekort, showing a paperback with a colour painting of two mostly naked humans standing on either side of a tree with a snake-human hybrid reaching down with a small branch in his hand. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, eyeing up the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This is the 1592 oil painting De Zondeval, by Dutch Golden Age painter Cornelis Cornelisz.

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96d

This week's #NewBooks at the library: Three more books from the NHBS January sale
- The Mandrill: A Case of Extreme Sexual Selection, a scientific monograph by Alan F. Dixson, published by Cambridge University Press.
- Plant Love: The Scandalous Truth About the Sex Life of #Plants, a popular science book on #Botany by Michael Allaby, published by Filbert Press.
- Unnatural Companions: Rethinking Our Love of Pets in an Age of Wildlife #Extinction, a difficult but necessary book by Peter Christie, published by Island Press.

#Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #Primatology #Evolution #EvolutionaryBiology #SexualSelection #ConservationBiology @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing upright on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books and part of the beech-coloured laminate floor.

On the left, The Mandrill, showing a purple hardback with a colour drawing of the multi-coloured face of a primate, here a male mandrill.

In the middle, Plant Love, showing a small hardback with a rambunctious colour illustration of green leaves and red flowers.

On the right, Unnatural Companions, showing a yellow hardback with the black silhouette of a domestic cat walking up to the black silhouette of a small bird.

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73d

New review: From Archaeopteryx then, to ten thousand species now: The Story of Birds sees Brusatte skillfully and captivatingly recount another chapter of life's evolutionary history.

https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2026/06/29/book-review-the-story-of-birds-an-evolutionary-history-of-the-dinosaurs-that-live-among-us/

#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Evolution #Paleontology #Palaeontology #Fossils #Birds #Ornithology #Scicomm @bookstodon

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88d

This week's #NewBooks at the library: Three more books from the NHBS January clearance sale
- 18 Miles: The Epic Drama of Our #Atmosphere and Its #Weather by Christopher Dewdney, published by Bloomsbury Sigma.
- Landscapes of #Collectivity in the Life Sciences, a more heady edited volume in the Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology from @themitpress.
- Animal Languages: The Secret Conversations of the Living World by Eva Meijer, here in the English translation published by John Murray.

#Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #AtmosphericSciences #Climatology #Meteorology #Biology #Philosophy #Ethology #AnimalBehavior @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books.

On the left, 18 Miles, showing a a blue hardback with a blue sky and white clouds.

In the middle, Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences, showing a white hardback with an abstract piece of artwork. Two separate blue-grey rectangles are connected by a tangle of tan-coloured ropes. This is a 1966 sculpture by Eva Hesse, titled Metronomic Irregularity I.

On the right, Animal Languages, a cream-coloured hardback where each letter of the word animal has a colour illustration of one or more animals poking from behind each letter.

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68d

This week's #NewBooks at the library:
- The final part of the #HPLovecraft Collected Fiction, A Variorum Edition, Volume 4: Revisions and Collaborations, by S. T. Joshi, published by Chiroptera Press.
- Christopher Tolkien's The Bovadium Fragments, published by HarperCollins.
- A second-hand copy of Evolution and the Machinery of Chance: Philosophy, Probability, and Scientific Practice in Biology, published by the University of Chicago Press.
#Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #Tolkien #Evolution @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books and part of the beech-coloured laminate floor.

On the left, standing up, H. P. Lovecraft Collected Fiction, A Variorum Edition, Volume 4: Revisions and Collaborations, showing a colourful hardback with colour illustrations of tentacled beings

On the right, lying down, Evolution and the Machinery of Chance, showing a plain black hardback with the title on its spine.

On the right, standing on top of that book, The Bovadium Fragments, showing a white hardback with a colour painting of a landscape that is broken into many shards.

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61d

This week's #NewBooks at the library:
- I found a much reduced copy of Contesting Earth's History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860–1935: Believers and Visionaries on the Borderlines of #Geology and #Palaeontology, published by Oxford University Press
- I was so taken with Guillermo del Toro's visual take on #Frankenstein, I bought the book on the making of the movie by Sheila O'Malley, published by Titan Books.
- I found a second-hand copy of The Spirit of System: #Lamarck and #EvolutionaryBiology, published by Harvard University Press, which should come in handy for a future review on Lamarck.

#Books #Bookstodon #Paleontology #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Evolution #Scicomm @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books and part of the beech-coloured laminate floor.

On the left, Contesting Earth's History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860–1935, showing a colourful hardback with colour illustrations of prehistoric and current animals, following the traditional scala naturae order of placing the less developed animals at the bottom and two naked humans at the top.

In the middle, Frankenstein, showing a large bordeaux-red hardback with a colour photo of Frankenstein's monster, looking back at the viewer over its shoulder, its mouth covered by the collar of a fur coat

On the right, The Spirit of System, showing a light-blue hardback with a monochrome dark-red drawing of a large wading bird, possibly a heron.

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51d

New review: The Inquisitive Biologist reaches back in time and finally reads The Ascent of Birds to find a fascinating foray into bird evolution and the many different mechanisms of speciation.

https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2026/07/21/book-review-the-ascent-of-birds-how-modern-science-is-revealing-their-story/

#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Birds #Ornithology #Evolution #EvolutionaryBiology #Scicomm @bookstodon

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46d

This week's #NewBooks at the library: I went to DinoCon and treated myself to Sean Hennesy's Speed Thief Volumes 1 and 2, and two art portfolios by Steve White, Dread Sovereign and The Bone Cabin Chronicles

#Books #Bookstodon #Palaeoart #Paleoart #Dinosaurs #Scicomm @bookstodon

On the left, standing up, Speed Thief Volumes 1 and 2, showing two small hardbacks with a black-and-white cartoon dinosaur on them.

In the middle, lying down, The Bone Cabin Chronicles, showing a square hardback with a complex line drawing of a man sitting in his easy chair in front of a fire, surrounded by numerous dinosaurs.

On the right, standing up, Dread Sovereigns, showing a white hardback with a colour illustration of a carnivorous dinosaur with a bloody head resting against some tree stumps.

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26d

This week's #NewBooks at the library: second-hand copies galore!
- The #Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar: Life with a Lovable Tawny Owl, published by Bantam Press, bought at a local recycling shop.
- Lyell: The Past is the Key to the Present, published by the Geological Society of London.
- Volcanoes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Major Eruptions, published by @princetonupress.

Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #Birds #BirdsOfPrey #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Geology #EarthSciences #Volcanoes #Volcanology @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books.

On the left, The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar, showing a yellow hardback with a colour photo of a tawny owl sitting on a small stack of books. Mounted on the wall behind it is an old-fashioned black rotary phone.

In the middle, Lyell: The Past is the Key to the Present, showing a blue hardback with an oil portrait of a white man with a receding hairline wearing black Victorian garb, shown down to his chest.

On the right, Volcanoes in Human History, showing a reddish-grey hardback with a colour illustration of a historical volcanic eruption. In the foreground are several small sailing boats, a larger two-master, and two human figures on a rocky promontory.

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12d

This week's #NewBooks at the library: Several new books bought at bargain prices:
- The Nile Basin: Quaternary #Geology, #Geomorphology and Prehistoric Environments by Martin Williams, published by Cambridge University Press.
- A Pipeline Runs Through It: The Story of #Oil from Ancient Times to the First World War by Keith Fisher, published by Allen Lane.
- The Great Paradox of #Science: Why Its Conclusions Can Be Relied Upon Even Though They Cannot Be Proven by Mano Singham, published by Oxford University Press.

#Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #EarthSciences #FossilFuels #Energy #History #Philosophy @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books and part of the beech-coloured laminate floor.

On the left, The Nile Basin, showing a hardback with a colour photo of a sand-filled desert landscape with stone ruins in the background against a cloudless blue sky.

In the middle, A Pipeline Runs Through It, showing a hardback with a black-and-white period photo of a landscape full of old-timey oil pumps and various sheds. In the foreground is a row of people posing for the photographer, some on horseback, and one in an early nineteenth-century open-topped automobile.

On the right, The Great Paradox of Science, showing a hardback with three coloured bands running from dark to very light teal. In the top section is an upturned Penrose triangle, an optical illusion of an impossible triangle.

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7d

Hmmm, no book reviews in August. Do you still have a pulse?

Yes, dear readers, I might have mentioned that once I get my teeth stuck in Darwin's Descent of Man, they would remain firmly lodged there. Here is a progress shot as I am grinding my way through over 700 pages of Victorian English and effectively a separate book of dense annotations. No shortcuts here, just reading books cover to cover before writing a review, so I beg your patience.

And those books on the left? I am settling in for a deep dive into this topic.

#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Bookstodon #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #Evolution #SexualSelection #CharlesDarwin #HistSci #Scicomm @bookstodon @princetonupress @princetonnature

A photo of three books standing on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books and part of the beech-coloured laminate floor.

On the right, The Descent of Man, showing a white oblong hardback with a colour photo of a fan of brown bird feathers with noticeable eyespots (these belong to the argus pheasant). The book is heavily annotated with yellow Post-it notes

On the left, two books: Darwin and the Making of a Sexual Selection, a white hardback with a period black-and-white cartoon illustration of a woman in Victorian garb seen from the back, holding a small umbrella. Her head, back, and the umbrella are covered with coloured peacock feathers. Next to it is A Most Interesting Problem, showing a white hardback with two monotone colour illustrations of a chimpanzee skeleton in yellow and a human skull in green.

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4d

This week's #NewBooks at the library: three second-hand books, all revolving around the theme of ice.
- #Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of the World's Most Mysterious Continent by Gabrielle Walker, published by Bloomsbury Publishing.
- The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the #IceAge by Edmund Blair Bolles, published by Counterpoint.
- Glaciovolcanism on Earth and Mars: Products, Processes and Palaeoenvironmental Significance by Benjamin R Edwards and John L Smellie, published by Cambridge University Press.

#Books #Bookstodon #Glaciology #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Volcanology #EarthSciences #Geology #Scicomm @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books and part of the beech-coloured laminate floor.

On the left, standing up, Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of the World's Most Mysterious Continent, showing a blue hardback with a colour photo of the sea filled with large chunks of floating ice against a cloudy blue sky and a single penguin in the bottom left corner.

In the middle, lying down, The Ice Finders, showing a small hardback with a large black band at the bottom with the subtitle, and a narrow white band across the top with the title and a colour photo of icebergs floating in water.

On the right, standing up, Glaciovolcanism on Earth and Mars, showing a white hardback with a close-up photo of a field of snow with red-hot glowing lava flowing over it. The lava is crusting over in many places.

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11h

New review: A potent mixture of cartoons and palaeontology, these giftable hardbacks show that humour can be an important component of science communication.

https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2026/09/10/book-review-speed-thief-volume-i-volume-ii/

#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Fossils #Paleontology #Palaeontology #Dinosaurs #Scicomm @bookstodon

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