Ruben Comitini

@rubencomitini.bsky.social

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🎓 BSc in Natural Sciences 🇮🇹 🎓 Ongoing MSc in Palaeontology 🇫🇷 & 🇸🇪 Palaeontology (dinos and other reptiles + fossil plants sometimes) | Clean tech and sustainability | Biodiversity and nature conservation | I'm gay 🏳️‍🌈 & love BL series 🏳️‍🌈🇹🇭 | K-pop & T-pop 🇰🇷🎸🇹🇭

Two solitary rugose corals (one is only partially visible at the bottom left of the image). The scale shows that the larger specimen is around 2 cm long. The stalk by which the animals would have been attached to the substrate is in both cases pointing towards the top right.
Steep mountains towering over a crystal blue sea in the Lofoten Archipelago of the Norwegian Arctic, during a clear and sunny day of August.
A path zigzagging between snow-covered fields. In the background, several viking burial mounds, and, behind them, a tall church. The sky is bright, without even one cloud.
Thin section of a carbonate rock showing a gastropod in a brown, fine-grained matrix. Other fossil shells can be seen on its right. Observed with 10x objective.
Larch forest in a very white, snowy day. Aosta Valley (Italy), yesterday.
Photo showing the anterior half of a well-preserved partially articulated skeleton of a phocid. Part of the skull and of some limb bones has been reconstructed.
An asterolith (the minuscule star-shaped structure in the middle of the picture). Since it is just a few tens of micrometres in diameter, it is difficult to see it much better than this with an optical microscope.
A tall Jurassic rock pillar on top of a cliff. Behind it, a green central European forest and a distant castle. All in a beautiful, sunny spring day. Ojców National Park, Poland.
The first of the slides accompanying my Bachelor's thesis. The title is "The dermal armour of the common caiman (Caiman crocodilus): insights from the study of a complete specimen". The names of my supervisor Prof. Massimo Delfino and my cosupervisor Dr. Jules Denis Walter are written, along with mine. On top, the logos of the University of Turin and of its Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology.
Many herds of woolly mammoths crossing a vast steppe, with dramatic snow-capped mountains in the background.
Poster of Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age featuring beautiful woolly mammoths
An elongated burrow preserved as a relief on coarse-grained sediments. A scale bar shows that the observable part is around 20 cm long and 1-1.5 cm wide. It appears that the burrow branches on the right of the image.
Photo from a short walk in the centre of Lille, with the Opéra de Lille in the foreground.
Our team looking for fossils in the spectacular setting of the Little St. Bernard Pass. All the dark rocks in the foreground are Carboniferous and potentially fossil-bearing.
A couple of damselflies mating on the edge of an artificial pond.
A partial carbonified leaf on a small block of greyish-blue clay. The color of these clays gives the Argille Azzurre Formation its name (literally "Blue Clays Formation").
Photo of me in front of a Tilia cordata (small-leaved linden) in the courtyard of the Department of Life Sciences.
A carbonified and compressed fossil of a four-spined nut-type fruit, belonging to Trapa natans, in my hand. The fossil is approximately 4 cm wide.
"The tyrannosaur chronicles" and "Uncovering dinosaur behavior", both by Dr. David Hone, on a couple of piles of science books and journals.
The pond as it is now: a big hole covered in a waterproof sheet and filled with water. We are covering the bottom and its shores with soil, stones and wood. We still need to add many aquatic plants and to make the immediate surroundings wilder.
A small waterfall in a mountain forest dominated by larches and pines
Aerial view of Kraków's historical center. From Wikipedia
Marine sediments with strata of different colors (from almost white to brown-reddish and blue-grey). The strata on the bottom are fine-grained (probably the top of a turbidite sequence), while above them there are conglomerates (probably the base of deposits formed by another successive turbidity flow - other finer-grained strata above these are not visible in the picture).
Google Maps screenshot showing a flooding alert, motorways and minor roads closed and traffic jams on the few open ones, near Ivrea (Turin Province)
A lymnaeid gastropod specimen preserved in alcohol and observed through a microscope.
A photo taken during the process of identification and selection of fossils from filtered sediments, depicting small mounds of sediment on a table and a bag with more sediment, as well as small boxes with some interesting specimens we recovered.
An Apenninic valley fully covered by forest and surrounded by rounded mountains partially hidden by fog.
A narrow unpaved road heading into a conifer-dominated mountain forest. Tall and steep cliffs tower the area. The sky is white and cloudy.
The view facing Southwest from the "Panoramica Zegna" scenic road. The rounded hills in the foreground are those near the city of Biella; beyond those there is an extremely straight hill (called Serra d'Ivrea) and further away another one a bit more irregular (that is the hill on which I live!): these are part of the moraine system surrounding the Ivrea Morainic Amphitheater (the flat region in between cannot be seen in this picture). The Serra d'Ivrea represents also the border between the provinces of Biella and Turin. Far, far away you can see the Westernmost part of the Alpine arc, with a very prominent pyramid-like mountain (located 135 km away in a straight line from the point where I took this photo!) that is Monviso, the highest mountain in the Cottian Alps, reaching an altitude of 3,841 m. It's from the feet of this peak that the Po River, the longest of Italy and the one that has created the vast Po Valley, is born.
Two wild alpine ibexes, one grazing on the left, the other on the opposite side of the picture walking to the right. The one on the left shows an identification label on its left ear. They both have wonderful horns. On the background, a larch forest and tall cliffs under a white sky.
Two wild chamoises grazing in a pasture in the proximity of a village
An alpine chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra) in alert position
Beautifully preserved fossil leaves coloured in brown and red on a grey matrix.
Sediments rich in fossil leaves.
Example of a fossil seed we collected yesterday. Of course it wasn't found in this rock (I put it on a white pebble just to take a picture of it). The width of the seed is about 1 cm.
Partially flooded river bed with Pliocene clay-rich sediments of blueish color exposed. The black areas in these sediments are all plant remains.
Teredinid burrows. These were originally made inside wood, but the organic matter has disappeared and we can only see the many sediment-filled burrows one over the other. Upper Miocene, Italy.
A partial fossil leaf on a matrix full of plant remains (mainly wood). Upper Miocene, Italy.
A cross-country ski track passing through a spruce forest heavily covered in snow and towered by forested mountains.
A Glyptodon carapace in exhibition in front of a wall panel with a skeletal reconstruction of the whole animal and drawings of some of its bones. On the lower left corner wooden boxes with single Glyptodon and Doedicurus bones can be seen.
An Upper Miocene marine succession, with strata of various colors and granulometry well distinguishable.
A world map showing some European countries in different colors that represents the country I am from (yellow), the countries I have been to (green) and a country I will visit in a few months (blue). The countries are: Home country: Italy Been to (in chronological order): Switzerland, Slovenia, Croatia, France, Monaco, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Spain, Andorra, San Marino, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Czechia, Finland, Portugal, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia Scheduled visit: United Kingdom
Black and white portrait of a gelada (Theropithecus gelada) sitting on a hill in the Ethiopian highlands.
Leaves and seed cones of Cryptomeria japonica. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Fossil leaves of the conifer Glyptostrobus from the Early Miocene of Bı́lina (Czech Republic). Nowadays this genus can only be found in South China (and locally in Vietnam and Laos). Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Interpretative drawings of a high-diversity assemblage of leaves from the Early Miocene riparian forest at Bı́lina (Czech Republic). Some of these leaves represent genera that have been extirpated from Europe but can still be found elsewhere, for example Nyssa (9), Parrotia (14), Taxodium (15) and Liquidambar (16). From Kvaček (1998).