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Dr Thomas Halliday

@tjdhalliday.bsky.social
291 followers 126 following 163 posts

Author of OTHERLANDS (Foyle's BOTY 2022) and its illustrated counterpart (Foyle's Children's 2025, Wainwright Children's 2026), currently writing a second adult book. Palaeontologist, sometime TV quizzer, international croquet player, lapsed choral singer.

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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 3h
As it's National Poetry Day, here's a sample of my own - a poem that was shortlisted for the Brilliant Poetry award for scientific verse. It's in the form of a tritina, and is about the mountain that overlooked my childhood home, both a scientific and folkloric landmark.
The Schiehallion Experiment
by Thomas Halliday

They say this mountain guards the underworld.
That fairies lure men here to lose their way.
Then Hutton came, and Burrow, Maskelyne.

They hung a lead upon a dangling line.
And watched as, slowly, round it gently whirled,
As did, above, the turning Milky Way.

They stilled the weight, and stars revealed which way
Was down, and how the thread ought to incline
And overcome the mass of all the world.

The line itself was lured, the world to weigh.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I'm so fed up with these unnatural machine men with their "machine minds" and "machine hearts".
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The New York Times @nytimes.com · 21/09/2026
Scientists have found singing lemurs, known as indris, and opera singers use similar mouth shapes to create loud, high-pitched calls.
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The Wainwright Prizes @wainwrightprize.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
We're delighted to announce that the winner of the 2026 Children's Wainwright Prize Book of the Year is... Otherlands, Thomas Halliday, illustrated by Gavin Scott (@puffinbooksuk.bsky.social) #WainwrightPrize #StoriesThatConnect
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The Wainwright Prizes @wainwrightprize.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
We’re delighted to announce the 2026 #WainwrightPrize Winners! 🍃 From powerful nature writing & urgent conservation stories to extraordinary illustration, this year’s winners celebrate the many ways stories can connect people & planet. wainwrightprize.com #StoriesThatConnect
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
🎉🎉🎉🎉
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Really sorry that, recovering from surgery, I can't make it to Kent for the @wainwrightprize.bsky.social awards ceremony. Such a great selection of books and authors - Suzanne Simard, Cal Flyn, Harriet Rix, Dave Goulson, and many others. Have a great evening! wainwrightprize.com/shortlist-20...
wainwrightprize.com
Shortlist 2026 - Wainwright Prize
Shortlists Announced From powerful conservation writing and breathtaking illustrated books to unforgettable stories for young readers, we’re delighted to reveal the 2026 Wainwright Prize Shortlists.  ...
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Dr Alex Bond @thelabandfield.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
"Is plastic pollution getting worse?" It's the question we get asked more than any other. After 15 years of data from Lord Howe Island, we finally have a straight answer. 🧵 🔗 agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...
A hand holding a plastic fork piece in the foreground. In the background, another hand lays out plastics on a sheet of paper towel. The plastic was in a shearwater chick's stomach.
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Alice Roberts @profaliceroberts.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I’ve reached the point - well actually, I reached it a while ago - where I’m militantly anti-AI. Fine - use it in bioscience labs and radiology where it might help analyse data more effectively. Use it sparingly for systems engineering. Everywhere else, it can fuck off.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Ketan Joshi always hits the nail on the head.
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Rachel Fox @therealdaftbear.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Yup. I’ve decided not to talk about left and right. I go by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Now let’s see who’s calling those “woke” or leftie ideas because they are supposed to be the bar all of our politics does not drop below.
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Enfield Dispatch @enfielddispatch.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Council urged to come clean on changes to Enfield Town revamp after project 'paused' There are fears the Conservative administration could be about to scrap long-planned cycle lanes in enfielddispatch.co.uk/council-urged…
enfielddispatch.co.uk
Council urged to come clean on changes to Enfield Town revamp after project 'paused'
There are fears the Conservative administration could be about to scrap long-planned cycle lanes in Enfield Town
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Back home after a surprise weekend in hospital. I can't possibly remember everyone's names, but thanks to everyone at Barnet Hospital for their quick care. My appendix was out only about 14 hours after arriving at A&E, and I was home again the next day. Just fantastic NHS care.
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Paul Bernal @paulbernal.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
How about ‘but what are they protesting? The idea that the RNLI should not rescue people in trouble in the sea is abhorrent and inhuman and we should be utterly repelled by it.’
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Very proud of my brother's partner Rachel Gray, who yesterday won the most prestigious prize at the Raasay Restitution piping competition - the ceòl mòr category for a piobaireachd song, beating an absolutely stellar line up of the legends of modern piping. Keeping the old traditions alive.
Rachel Gray in the foreground playing a black set of Great Highland pipes. She stands on a balcony with a white wrought iron railing on top of a stone wall. Below, the grass, edged with a stand of Scots Pines, stretches away to the sea, across which you can see the mountains of Skye through the haze.

Photo by Fergus Halliday
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
A committee votes through things unanimously until they don't.
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The Royal Society @royalsociety.org · 29/08/2026
The Darwin Medal 2026 is awarded to Professor Michael J Benton OBE FRS for his contribution to many aspects of palaeontological science, as well as authoring the standard textbooks in the field, popular science and children’s books. #RSMedals royalsociety.org/medals-and-prizes/…
A man in a blue shirt and glasses smiles at the camera in front of a university building interior.
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Professor Anjali Goswami FRS @evoswami.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Absolutely delighted to have been awarded the Faraday Prize! Scientific research is critical for solving the challenges that humanity and the planet currently faces, but ensuring that diverse communities are engaged in & benefit from science are just as important as the work that happens in the lab.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Well said. We've been washing with bottled water and a flannel for the best part of a week in the middle of a drought. Climate change's effects aren't just different weather, they impact the infrastructure we all depend on.
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Gavin Schmidt @climateofgavin.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
The difference in utility between the use of ML to tackle big data problems that would otherwise be intractable & the use of LLMs to produce pointless slop is so large they cannot both be usefully described as “AI“. The first is making real progress, the second is dragging us towards the abyss.
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Zack Polanski @zackpolanski.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
It’s time we sorted out the press. Constant misinformation to protect their donors and fossil fuels is destroying lives and our planet. The Government must step up and stop being cowardly.
Sorry Zack Polanski this long hot summer is not the apocalypse - it's like a gloriously long holiday in France
..with village green cricket thrown in good measure
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
My silliest discovery of the #eclipse: filming through glass means that you can get a pretty crisp image and make it orbit the sun and dance about into your garden.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Reform tried to stop them after the third verse. I wonder why it was then? "Not in this land alone, But be God’s mercies known, From shore to shore! Lord make the nations see, That men should brothers be, And form one family, The wide world o’er." Excellent malicious compliance from Kent Greens.
Metro newspaper headline - Councillors wind up Reform by singing too much of the national anthem
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Today, walked down Merryhills Way with the boys. We watched a green woodpecker bounce through the air across the fields, a kestrel hovering and diving, some very camouflaged fritillary butterflies and a rather sad desiccated frog near a small dried-up pond. All on the site of the proposed New Town.
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Another Green @anothergreen.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Elinor Ostrom the first woman to win a Nobel in #economics was born today 7th August 1933, she worked on commons ownership, deep democracy and tackling #climatechange. We should respect her rules for radicals! www.plutobooks.com/product/elin...
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Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
I've confirmed that the UK's new Sovereign AI Fund does no due diligence on whether AI companies use copyrighted work without permission before investing in them. It took me 3 Freedom of Information requests to find this out: 🧵 1/10
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
As if you needed another reason to hate everything that AI companies are doing, this report has them slicing and pulping rare books because they've contaminated the corpus of the internet too much to use...
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Ville Sinkkonen @villesinkkonen.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
End cretaceus hell
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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Just been sitting right here thinking about that tech bro so desperate to live forever. Just imagine: some of us get to enjoy the privilege of spending time on this astonishing planet, and yet for folks like him it's still not enough.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
No no no no no.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Fahnbulleh as Climate minister is a good choice, in my opinion. She will be pushing for more and faster transition to renewables. Mahmood and Phillipson staying on is *much* less reassuring, and seems to be a total failure to read the room on whose votes Labour has lost and why.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
Hicham El Guerrouj was my sporting hero as a kid. His running was extraordinary. But if one of his records had to fall, I'm delighted it's to Josh Kerr. www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athlet...
bbc.co.uk
London Diamond League results: Josh Kerr smashes men's mile world record
Great Britain's Josh Kerr smashes the long-standing men's mile world record in a spectacular performance at the London Diamond League.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Delighted that Otherlands Illustrated has been longlisted for the @wainwrightprize.bsky.social in the Children's Non Fiction category. And alongside the next in the excellent "Everything you know about x is Wrong" series by my good pal Nick Crumpton, who shares Gavin Scott as illustrator!
Longlisted books for the Wainwright Prize. Otherlands is among them.
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Natalia (娜塔莉) @wrycritic.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
$50.1 million could fund over 400 doctorates; 933 years worth of annual curator salaries (UK), or running cost for a millennium-worth of free events like the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival. It is inane that people can accumulate such wealth, and use it explicitly to cause public harm.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Of those I have spent time in: Edinburgh Stockholm Chicago Budapest Copenhagen All places with great culture, fairly easy to get about (Chicago at least in relative terms in the US), good food.
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James Austin @jamesdaustin.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
It is mad that we have, somehow, allowed net zero - a policy common to all major parties under 5 years ago and supported by a majority of the public - to become a synoym for mad radicalism. It is doubly mad that we've allowed this to happen during the hottest summer on record.
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Reuters @reuters.com · 14/07/2026
Elon Musk's xAI has installed more than double the number of gas turbines than it has publicly acknowledged to power its Colossus 2 data center project, without federal permits, and the pollution is hitting predominantly Black neighborhoods the hardest reut.rs/4bIghEm
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Richard Butler @richardjbutler.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
23 month research associate job now available with our team to work on Middle Jurassic mammals from Scotland. Requires strong experience with segmentation of CT data but does not require a PhD. Deadline for applications is 26th July. edzz.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
edzz.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com
Research Associate (Leverhulme) - School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences - 105138 - Grade 6
This is a Research Associate position to assist in palaeobiological research conducted as part of the project “New Insights Into Early Mammal Evolution From Exceptional Scottish Fossils” funded by the...
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Disappointing to see Miliband, who has been a real positive force in this Labour government and for whom I have had a lot of time, bending the knee to fossil fuel interests and undermining his good work. Approving new gas fields? Economic and environmental madness.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
My younger son's choir is doing a Les Mis medley at the moment, and it's bringing back the best school musical experience I ever had back in 2006. But it's poignant as three of the then cast and crew independently died a few years later aged only 20. Craig, Siobhan, Tom. Empty chairs indeed.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
This (BBC's 'Evolution') does sound brilliant, mixing modern and extinct life with proper science. But you can't tell me that image is not a Pokémon about to scream its name and unleash a fearsome bubblebeam.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
To be a Tory these days you need to be explicitly against both human rights *and* objective reality...
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Despite all the noise today I'd really like you to read this, as I think it's crucial. The government's in the process of p*ssing up to £264 billion into the ground, at the behest of the fossil fuel industry. Yes, £264 *billion*. It's utterly mad, and has to stop. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
The great carbon capture con: behold the wasted billions Burnham could claw back | George Monbiot
There are far better ways to tackle climate breakdown, but successive governments have chosen to listen to the fossil fuel companies instead, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot
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The Green Party of England & Wales @greenparty.org.uk · 07/07/2026
Billionaires are buying influence in British politics. It's time to cap political donations and make every vote count equally.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
My child's maths homework this week was a whole lot of "if x weight of apples cost £50, how much would cost £70?" But it was all in pounds and stones. Had to do some googling to convert - it was all metric in my day...
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Adrian Ramsay @adrianramsay.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
This Prime Minister has abjectly failed to meet the moment on the defining issue of our age: climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse. The next PM must not repeat this. Andy Burnham cannot treat climate and nature as second order. Me in @PoliticsHome: www.politicshome.com/opinion/arti...
politicshome.com
Starmer looked away from the climate crisis. Burnham must not
We haven't heard much from the prime minister-in-waiting about the defining issue of the age.
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
"You don't need to try so hard" from a fellow science book writer, shortly after being amazed that I currently make a living solely through writing. I'm still not sure what he meant, but I disagree with every interpretation I've come up with...
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Prospect Magazine @prospectmagazine.co.uk · 28/06/2026
Despite the warnings on our screens and newspapers, even usually sensible people seemed to approach the heatwave with scepticism, writes Ellen Halliday
prospectmagazine.co.uk
Heatwave sceptics reveal our climate delusion
This week’s heat made plain how difficult it is for us to comprehend what is happening
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Dr Thomas Halliday @tjdhalliday.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Lying in the cool of the garden, as the sun sets. Looking up, the clouds seem to vibrate and shimmer as if they are being reflected on water - is that me seeing the refraction of a cold mass of air arriving? Scattered bats and raindrops appear in the sky, but not for long enough.
A sunset behind trees with scattered clouds in the sky.
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Dr. Jonathan Foley @globalecoguy.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
I especially love this diagram.
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