A rare, half-billion-year-old fossil gives us a clue to how a bizarre marine invertebrate can possibly be related to humans. In a study published on July 6 in the journal Nature Communications, Harvard University researchers identified a prehistoric specimen in a collection at the Natural History Museum of Utah as a tunicate, or sea squirt. The preserved invertebrate, which was originally discovered in the rugged, desert-like landscape of the House Range in western Utah, can be used to understand evolution mysteries that go way back to the Cambrian explosion.

“There are essentially no tunicate fossils in the entire fossil record. They’ve got a 520- to 540-million year-long gap,” says Karma Nanglu, an invertebrate paleontologist at Harvard. “This fossil isthe first soft-tissue tunicate in, we would argue, the entire fossil record.”

https://www.popsci.com/environment/tunicate-fossil-cambrian-explosion/#:~:text=A%20500%2Dmillion%2Dyear%2D,the%20history%20of%20animal%20life.

https://undark.org/2023/07/05/neglect-of-a-museums-collection-could-cause-scientific-setbacks/

IN A DUSTY ROOM in central Florida, countless millipedes, centipedes, and other creepy-crawlies sit in specimen jars, rotting. The invertebrates are part of the Florida State Collection of Arthropods in Gainesville, which totals more than 12 million insects and other arthropod specimens, and are used by expert curators to identify pest species that threaten Florida’s native and agricultural plants.

However, not all specimens at the facility are treated equally, according to two people who have seen the collection firsthand. They say non-insect samples, like shrimp and millipedes, that are stored in ethanol have been neglected to the point of being irreversibly damaged or lost completely.

When it comes to how the FSCA stacks up with other collections she’s worked in, Ann Dunn, a former curatorial assistant, is blunt: “This is the worst I’ve ever seen.”

Experts say the loss of such specimens — even uncharismatic ones such as centipedes — is a setback for science. Particularly invaluable are holotypes, which are the example specimens that determine the description for an entire species. In fact, the variety of holotypes a collection has is often more important than its size, since those specimens are actively used for research, said Ainsley Seago, an associate curator of invertebrate zoology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

A paper published in March 2023 highlighted the importance of museum specimens more generally, for addressing urgent issues like climate change and wildlife conservation, with 73 of the world’s largest natural history museums estimating their total collections to exceed 1.1 billion specimens. “This global collection,” the authors write, “is the physical basis for our understanding of the natural world and our place in it.”

So, I have a casual interest, but I find them intriguing. I recently took a trip to Lassen National Park, and saw this boiling mud pool. https://imgur.com/n6dV92U. I am planning a trip next year to Pompeii and Herculaneum. Someday, I am interested in seeing volcanoes in Hawaii and Iceland and maybe more. I casually enjoyed HarryTurtledove's survival novels about Yellowstone erupting, although they are not great literature by any means.

What about you? Any cool experiences with volcanoes or bucket list plans that you would like to share? Do you know fun facts? Do we have any geologists in the room? Take this prompt in any direction you would like.

I enjoy a few weather tools. For example, I enjoy
blitzortung that shows live lightning. Currently, you can see a long chain of lighting through eastern Germany and up through Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

This is expected, since we’ve had very warm weather for a while, and it’s supposed to change to colder weather soon.

But is there a good website that can show me easily the weather front that is currently creating all those lightning strikes? The sites I know only shows vague colors and you can perhaps implicitly see some change in pressure, wind, temperature etc, but nothing that clearly shows an east front where for example you would expect lightning soon.

I was always familiar with tornadoes living close to or in Oklahoma for a vast majority of my life. However, with the odd weather patterns we’re seeing this year producing severe weather, I’ve gone way down the rabbit hole. Watching weather livestreams, subscribing to chasers, the works. Has anyone else been on the bandwagon?