Stephen Heard

@stephenbheard.bsky.social

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Evolutionary ecologist & Boggle aficionado. Author: The Scientist's Guide to Writing; Charles Darwin's Barnacle and David Bowie's Spider. He/him.

Blog and book links: scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com

Posts Replies Media

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Stephen Heard

Quirky little spittlebug from Ecuador, took me a while to figure out which end was the front :P www.inaturalist.org/observations...

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Stephen Heard

I contributed a list to a new (to me) book-recommendation service, Shepherd.com. If you haven't seen it - it's fun, authors recommend some of their favourite books. Here's how I did it: scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2024/07/16/i...

Shepherd - Explore, discover, read!shepherd.com Shepherd is like wandering the aisles of your favorite bookstore. We’ve asked 9,000+ authors for their favorite books and made it easy to explore via topic, theme, and mood.

Low-hanging fruit: Taylor Swifts: guided birdwatching. Or, if you prefer, Tailored Swifts: guided birdwatching where you see only species you like. ("I don't like gannets. They wet their nests." - Marty Feldman)

I spent a bit of time this afternoon helping my 9-year-old brainstorm names for Taylor Swift themed businesses. Taylor Ships: package delivery and/or boat building Taylor Slips: waterslide construction Taylor Crypts: burial services Taylor Snips: hair styling Taylor Flips: home renovation/sales

Reply to

Rachel Deering

Yeah, I've seen it attributed to Merian elsewhere too, but I agree with you, likely a misattribution. Thanks for the quick reply!

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Stephen Heard

I’m guiding a tour that spends three days exploring Riding Mountain National Park. It’s one of my favourite places to visit in Manitoba, but I don’t get to come very often. Right now, the purple paintbrush are in full bloom and they are amazing. 🌿

Reply to

Rachel Deering

What's your source for this one? Doesn't look much like a Merian to me and a quick search couldn't find a credible attribution (some sites credit a Merian 'imitator'). But maybe I'm about to expand my concept of what she did?

Sculptor: So, do you like it? Patron: .......uh........ Sculptor: I made it just like you told me! Patron: You idiot. I said take good care when you carve her FOREHEAD. (Four-headed sphinx, 2nd century AD, Roman Egypt. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

I hypothesized that this street would lead to my hotel. My hypothesis was rejected. Well named street!

Although it did lead TOWARDS my hotel, so the process of making and rejecting a hypothesis led me toward truth. Darn street is so on the nose, my nose hurts.

Reply to

Dennis Hansen

It's less dangerous if you lean on libraries... but yes, I spent lots of time making lists of books I wanted to read!

This is MurderBird's close relative, the Terror Bird Paraphysornis! (The one on the left, I mean.) 3 m tall carnivorous robin, I mean bird. Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna.

This is MurderBird. I have a big (by city standards) back yard. This robin could hunt worms anywhere in it. But that is not what she does. Instead, she hops closer and closer to me. After each hop she straightens up, makes sure I'm watching, and glares fiercely at me. Then hops again. 1/n

Mind thoroughly blown today. Naturhistorisches Museum Vienna Natural History Museum, AND a chunk of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. More later, must rest feet and especially brain!!

Current status: Vienna!

This is fantastic. Layers of history and etymology, some Latin names mixed in, and the unexpected connection between marshmallows and purple dye.

The real Easter egg in this is the Latin name for what gives Empress 1908 gin its colour sesquiotic.com/2024/07/11/m...

mauvesesquiotic.com Maeve and Maude are sitting mellowly in Malvern drinking gin and tonic and eating marshmallows on Melba toast. They are, perhaps, not in the pink of their lives, but they are at least in the mauve. Or...

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Stephen Heard

When you defend your thesis, be sure to acknowledge those who helped you. It takes a lot of time, energy, and emotion to advise students well. It's my job to do that and I don't need a parade, but just seeing my name on a list of helpful people goes a long way in feeling like I was useful

Reply to

Whitney Barlow Robles

I really did! Learned a lot from your perspective. And envious of some lovely passages.

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Stephen Heard

"Curious Species" is an interesting new book from Whitney Barlow Robles @wbarlowrobles.bsky.social. It's about how natural historians have struggled to make sense of the animals they see. Read what I thought about it here: scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2024/07/09/c...

“Curious Species”: a historian’s take on how animals resisted being made sense ofscientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the early days of (European) science – roughly, the time from the 16th to early 19th centuries when we were essentially inventing science as a process. Sure, we...

Reply to

Rafael Marcondes

I never thought about the etymology... you're right, it comes from "ass" (the animal, that is), and no ass (the animal) I know of has ever supported reliance on student opinions surveys to evaluate teaching🤣

Always a bit frustrating to be asked to review someone's tenure/promotion dossier, and discover their university has completely asinine criteria (like dependence on student opinion surveys)

My approach is generally to say something pithy about how disappointed I am that they have such an asinine criterion, then to say explicitly that I don't want to penalize the candidate for this and they they have in fact met the asinine criterion...

(Over the years I have gotten progressively less subtle about how I state this. Actually used the word 'asinine' in the most recent case...)

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Stephen Heard

The number of writers who, apprised that the quote they found at BrainyQuote and want to use as an epigraph is a bit of refrigerator door wisdom that was not in fact written by Voltaire, Emerson, or Mrs. Parker, will still insist on using the quote, with the attribution, is far more than zero. 1/

Reply to

Ben Miller

You know, the cryptodire one kind of works as a poem. (Otherwise, yes, wow, those are terrible)

Wow, this is a bizarre story! A beetle species turns out to have been described based on deliberately altered specimens (likely by a collector, not clear if describer was involved) zookeys.pensoft.net/article/1249... 🧪🌎

DNA barcoding reveals a taxonomic fraud: Note on validity of Propomacrus muramotoae (Coleoptera, Scarabaeidae)zookeys.pensoft.net Until the early 2000s, the genus Propomacrus was known to comprise two species, occurring in the Eastern Mediterranean and Southeast China. The discovery of Propomacrus muramotoae Fujioka in Tibet and...

Look, finding a genuinely new insect species isn't particularly difficult - there are literally millions of them out there. Which is why I'd like to think it's an unscrupulous collector/seller problem. But echoes of Audubon's Bird of Washington... bioone.org/journals/bul...

Audubon's Bird of Washington: unravelling the fraud that launched <i>The birds of America</i>bioone.org The Bird of Washington Falco washingtoniiAudubon, 1827, was a new species of eagle published in the opening plates of John James Audubon's influential work, The birds of America (1827–38). It was the ...

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Stephen Heard

Please take pride in your work. You made something, you amazing human. You have every right to sing its praises. Don't damn yourself with faint praise. Don't shit on your own parade. You're absolutely entitled to share your stuff with joy. Well done!

One of my favourite books of all time.

Happy 57th anniversary of signing the first contract for A Wizard of Earthsea, which you will note was titled, at the time of signing, The Wizard's Quest. Narrow escape!

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Stephen Heard

These two pictures are of the same thing. Just arranged differently.