RollBones, Bone-Hunting Author

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🎉📕Happy to announce that “CARCASS: ON THE AFTERLIVES OF ANIMAL BODIES” is now available for pre-order! In the 🔗🌲 Here is just a tiny selection of the things I covered in my book over a year of reporting. (And more than a decade of research if you count before the book deal!) Let me know any questions you have, suggestions for your events, whether you’d like a book box with a skull, etc! Thanks to @The MIT Press for publishing, and @BeastieandBone for designing the cover! (And to my home printer for making the prop cover—the real book will presumably be a bit different!) #booktok #Nonfiction #AuthorTok #CoverReveal #CarcassBook

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📍JUNCTION CITY, KS I’m giving another talk on how to find a lot of bones, this time at @Flint & Vine | Kansas Wine Bar ! 🗓️Friday September 18 🕖 7 PM 💵 $5/ticket Link in Bio or comment “Kansas” for the link! Not around KS? I’ll have a livestream at the same time via RollBones on TikTok!

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Just a selection of some of my favorite articles I’ve written about bones, death, and animals, as a professional science journalist. This is particularly special as my writing career has led me to the incredibly rewarding experience of writing and publishing a book, which is now available for pre-order from MIT Press. It’s called “Carcass: On the Afterlives of Animal Bodies,” and I used some of these articles in my query letter when I first pitched to my agent. Check the end for where to find lynx! (And I sadly don’t mean the wildcat!) #sciencejournalism #bones #carcassbook #LearnOnTikTok #stem

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Has this ever happened to you? Someone you know? (It happens to all of us.) People REALLY want to believe certain things, and if one person does it once, people will get the impression that it happens all the time. What do you think happened with the roadkill fur company, and why do you think no one wrote about it? #booktok #learnontiktokcontest #carcassbook #learnbiologyontiktok #logicalfallacies

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🔗in bio for my next in-person “How to Bone-Hunt” presentation in Junction City, Kansas! This is why I don’t plant bones to fake finding them: 1. Because that would be wrong, and against my ethics as a journalist, and 2. I REALLY don’t need to. I have sooooo much REAL bone footage and so little time to edit it. Instead, I get to teach you about real life biology through my real life finds! Although full disclosure: I have posted at least one obvious joke (explained in the caption) and in my older videos I might find something, pick it up, go “oh shoot, I should have filmed that” and then put it back down to film. Also: Sometimes when someone says something interesting, I ask, “Would you say that again on camera for the TikTok?” So that’s the extent to which some footage is kinda set up. But I would never put something in nature and pretend to find it. #learnontiktokcontest #learnbiologyontiktok #biology #osteology #nature

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The Mystery of the Half Pig Skulls! Why do I always find pig skulls that are broken apart or breaking apart at the seams? It’s because of biology and the industry of agriculture! #learnontiktokcontest #learnbiologyontiktok #Pigs #Agriculture #pork

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#gardeningtiktokcontest #Lawncare #fertilizer #vultureculture #LearnOnTikTok Greener lawns with Head Juice! Aka maceration buckets / rot water ! It can definitely be a form of fertiliser, but it’s not perfect. That said, if head juice is what you have, use it! (Anything with added chemicals such as peroxide is a different story.

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How do I find my career in writing? ✍️ 📕 Several ways! There are a variety of ways, but yes, the majority of my money comes from something creative or adjacent, like book-writing. And one thing that’s kind of like free money, which is almost like a secret hack, is applying for grants and fellowships. My only regrets are not applying for more of them. And I wish it wasn’t a secret. Every serious artist, writer, and creative who is trying to make a living from their craft should be aware of these. And I can’t believe none of the professionals in my journalism degrees, or my agent or publisher ever mentioned them! Grants account for about 55% of the money I got for my book, “Carcass: On the Afterlives of Animal Bodies!” And this is also for a homework assignment for News Creator Corps ! The assignment was to make a post with something I’d learned during the program—but it wasn’t even required to mention them! Just something I thought was important. #careertipstiktokcontest #booktok #moneyhacks #bookwriting #learnontiktok

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Replying to @RollBones, Bone-Hunting Author My Protorohippus on a horse skull piece (The Dawn) is at a National Juried Art Exhibition in Gillette, Wyoming at the AVA Community Art Center! The theme for the show is “Extinction.” (What is a National Juried Art Exhibition? I don’t know. But you can see it and vote for it for people’s choice.) This animal was formerly known as Eohippus and then Hyracotherium. But is an animal really extinct if its progeny lives on? (Well, yes. Especially since it’s not likely that any individual specimen was a totally-direct ancestor of the modern animals. But still, you can sort of say they survived. In a way. Their lineage. Right? Agree/disgree?) #extinction #learnontiktok #horses #fossils #art

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#stitch with @Jason Pargin, author Does China’s bone censorship affect that girl who posts all the bone videos? That’s me. And, well, I wouldn’t know exactly, but I can say the vids I have had t a kin down weren’t too boney! And that I do use alternate sp e lling s. And that I’ve yet to find a human skull in the wild. Also: TikTok is where I have the MOST followers! And @The Bone Museum has plenty of videos with human skulls, and they have a huge TikTok audience. So, they don’t seem to have issues. Could the key be in educational, academic, and otherwise fancy ways to make oneself seem..bona fide? (Bone-ified?) #TikTokCreatorSearchInsightsIncentive #bones #edutok #humanskulls