Tomorrow is the last day I am accepting submissions for Volume 4 of Awesome ‘Possum and I am pretty excited to see how many I get. I will post more details about it for Patrons only at the end of the week.

The silly thing is I haven’t decided what to do mine on! I never do until I see what else comes in. Then I try to fill a missing theme. I am leaning towards a quick biography of  Constantine Samuel Rafinesque. He was a bit of a nut and John Audobon pulled a species-seeker joke on him by providing him with “field notes” of fake species. Rafinesque was a little too eager to name species.

Or I might do it in Mary Anning. She was pretty amazing. She was poor so she collected shells and fossils to sell to make money for the family. Becuase of this, she found the first complete  ichthyosaur skeleton. She also found the first complete  Plesiosaurus  skeleton, I think. She also figured out how to use coprolites, fossilized poo, to figure out what extinct animals ate. In the early 1800s!

I learned about both these guys in The Species Seekers by Richard Conniff. That book is hilarious and informative. It is one of my favorite books, recommended to me by a friend’s father, who is an ornithologist.