It’s #Minnesota #FossilFriday! 🍃🦣🦥🐴🐪🦬🐟 Back up 95 million years from last Friday’s #lostBones #bison skull cap - here are some Cretaceous leaf fossils found along the Cottonwood River while working with staff from the Science Museum of Minnesota.

These fossils were found within a patchy broken stratum of Cretaceous-age sandstone and clay.

#Cretaceous #leaf #fossils #paleontology #shareyourdiscovery #citizenscience #sciencemuseumofmn

New research: #fires in #Australia (2019-2020) killed at least 60 billion #leaf #litter #arthropods, and perhaps up to 120 trillion (!!!) if #mites and #springtails are included.

Destruction of this community has effects on #decomposition, which affects stand #recovery.

It’s easy to forget all these tiny #deaths, but we should expect more of them as #ClimateChange and fire interact to accelerate #biodiversity loss.

OA 🔗 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aec.13375

Explainer 🔗 https://theconversation.com/more-than-60-billion-leaf-litter-invertebrates-died-in-the-black-summer-fires-heres-what-that-did-to-ecosystems-207032

🔥 🌳 🐜 🌳 🔥

This is one of the sprawlmonds I have outside my trailer. This year's dormant bud having awakened fully, the apical meristem motored on and created another node with more on the way.

#almond #spring #leaf #botany #horticulture

Yesterday I dissected a leaf cluster that had broken dormancy but was only partially emerged. The leaves at that point do not have the protections they need to stop losing moisture. So I backlit it to see how much I could see.

#leaf #Botany #almond

Took this photo before a trespasser's dogs harassed me out of being in the field.

Very happy to have captured this one as it's in focus and from an angle that shows a lot of the developmental things that I'll be writing my thesis about.

#bud #almond #botany #leaf #PlantMorphology

Shallow depth of field with the hand lens on the iPhone lens makes it challenging to get all the features I want in focus.

I continue to take daily photos of almond vegetative buds starting to leaf out.

#PlantMorphology #bud #botany #leaf #almond

Shallow depth of field with the hand lens on the iPhone lens makes it challenging to get all the features I want in focus.

I continue to take daily photos of almond vegetative buds starting to leaf out.

#PlantMorphology #bud #botany #leaf #almond

I've been too often exhausted (and having to split my time between coursework and research when I'm not). So this bud got dried out as I was dissecting it. Following Tom Kimmerer's advice, I put it in acetic acid (white vinegar was the best I could do) to soften it enough to get under thick glass for flattening.

It leaches the color out, but it does soften it up enough to be flattened without too much tearing.

#almond #bud #PlantMorphology #botany #leaf