Here's a brief thread about annotations in a book. This is one of my favourite #books on #frogs, Chris Mattison's 1987 Frogs and Toads of the World, one of the first of the Blandford Press animals of the world series...
My copy was purchased from the used book section of Gilbert's, a noted book seller/dealer in Southampton, today long since closed...
Whoever owned this book before me was properly interested in frogs, and was clearly collecting literature on them. We know this because they heavily annotated the book's bibliography. Look...
Their annotations show that they were aiming to obtain all the classic textbooks on #amphibians, as well as classic monographs, including those on Australasian and tropical American frog groups...
This, then, wasn't a casual interest. They seemed pretty serious. If you're aiming to track down Poynton 1964 on southern African amphibians, say.. (or _have_ obtained it)... you're in deep, you're not messing around...
I've often wondered who this person was. Were they a herpetologist? Fast forward to more recent years, and I was again in a bookshop in Southampton. I found another Chris Mattison Blandford book, the (also very good) Snakes of the World. I already own a copy, so didn't buy it...
I engaged in conversation with the woman at the till, who was interested in the natural history books I was buying. Her son-in-law, who lived in Southampton, was a herpetologist. Oh, interesting, said I. What was his name? ....
Chris Mattison.
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Once again it's time to embark on a #PrehistoricPlanet megathread, this time looking at episode 2 of season 2: Badlands. The first thing to note before we get started is that I screwed up in the previous thread, since I said there that Swamps was episode 2...
Nope, Badlands is episode 2 and Swamps is episode 3. Sorry! The Swamps megathread is here, by the way ...
Anyway…
#PrehistoricPlanet is streaming now on #AppleTV and represents a highly successful collaboration between #AppleTV and #BBCStudios. A massive team of hundreds of people worked together to bring #PrehistoricPlanet to the screen...
Yes, it's time another #TetZoocryptomegathread. In previous megathreads, I've covered several #LochNessMonster photos, including Hugh Gray's from 1933, Peter O'Connor's of 1960, and the Shiels 'muppet' of 1977. Time for another one!
Yes, you've heard of the #LochNessMonster, but maybe you don't know that a key piece of evidence long used to support its reality was a grainy bit of cine film, taken in 1960 by an aeronautical engineer from Reading in southern England…
This thread might be the longest and most complex so far, so hold tight. As ever, remember that I cover both sceptical and 'pro-monster' takes on the case concerned. The case I'm referring to concerns Tim Dinsdale's Foyers Bay footage of April 1960...
For something like four decades, Dr Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina has been arguing that everyone is wrong about #dinosaurs. His newest book is Romancing the Birds and Dinosaurs: Forays in Postmodern Paleontology. Here's a quick thread on its contents... 1/n
The book - RTBAD from hereon - is not an instruction manual for palaeozoophiles (art by @Book_Rat), nor does it include homage or reference to the 1984 movie Romancing the Stone. Rather, it’s composed of 23 essays on the state of dinosaur science as Feduccia sees it today... 2/n
@Book_Rat Early parts of RTBAD express Feduccia's disapproval of the power-hungry, juvenile popularists of our age. Some "have Twitter accounts with large followers [sic], dealing with everything from paleontological discoveries to sports and politics!" I'm among this awful lot ... 3/n
Welcome to a somewhat overdue (mega)thread devoted to the @AppleTV / @bbcstudios series #PrehistoricPlanet season 2 (#prehistoricplanet2 if you will), streaming NOW, and specifically to the first episode: ISLANDS...
Islands is one of my favourite episodes of #PrehistoricPlanet2. We knew early on that we’d cover stories relevant to the Late Cretaceous island faunas of Romania and Madagascar (since both places have revealed numerous amazing Late Cretaceous island-dwelling animals), but…
... what else could we show? The producer for this episode – Paul Stewart – worked really hard to find appropriate stories, and succeeded in focusing on amazing animals doing interesting things…
If you're interested in science you're familiar with Piltdown man, formally named Eoanthropus dawsoni in 1912 but shown to be hoaxed in 1953. What you may not be familiar with is the DUALIST CONTENTION, and here's a thread on it...
Yes, the one thing that every single person who’s heard of Piltdown man knows is that it was eventually determined to be a hoax. What’s discussed less frequently is that early 20th century views on Piltdown man were -far more complex- than popularly portrayed...
Acceptance of Eoanthropus as a valid proto-human (as per the Margaret Flinsch illustration here) might have been the 'mainstream' view that made it into textbooks and encyclopedias, but it certainly wasn’t the only one, nor was this acceptance wholesale or uncontroversial...