However weird you think Minnesota is, it’s so much weirder I gotta get home for the Solstice next year

Thanks so much, Brian. I’ve benefited from an amazing team from the prior organizers, current ones, Karen, the councils and the societies Parting advice: meeting organizers or council must decide what to maximize and how to know when it has succeeded. You really gotta nerd out and introspect

She was trying to cross a busy street here in Alexandria and I love her $250 bucks in supplies later, I can very much say this crab could not have found a better sucker to rescue her off the street

Headed home from #evol2026, my last one as the Chief Meeting Organizer. I have so much gratitude to this community of amazing people. I hope you all feel as energized as I do. I didn’t get many pictures, so please enjoy this groundhog I saw by the Noble Beast

“Collections are something done by past generations for future generations to preserve information” Dr. Jessica Ware, now discussing improving access to natural history collections at #evol2026

🌀 Beyond preservation: morphological analysis of Lower #Jurassic serpenticone #ammonoids The family serves as a crucial model for studying serpenticone morphology across various taxa. 📄 DOI: doi.org/10.18261/let... #Paleontology #Ammonoids #Stratigraphy #Paleobiology #Geology #Mesozoic

Pro-tip, #evol2026: the Red Line Train from the airport to the convention center area is 2 bucks. The view as it the Old River Valley opens up into Cleveland is pretty dope. Really looking forward to my train ride this afternoon.

Soon, we can stop saying this so much in my house

And don’t forget that if you upload your presentation in pptx format, you can take advantage of live captioning during your talk

Indeed: www.evolutionmeetings.org/online-progr... From the app or online program, you can also export a PDF of your itinerary, and print if you’d rather have paper copy

Sweating through the absolute disaster weather in the DC metro and longing to be at #evol2026, where the expected highs next weekend are in the 70s

The hermit crab I found trying to cross a busy street yesterday seems happy in her new digs If an owner doesn’t come forward, we’ll be getting her some buddies this weekend

The broader implication extends beyond flowering plants. Many famous "rocks vs. clocks" debates may not require choosing sides. The challenge is finding better ways to let fossils and molecules speak to each other. Link to our latest: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I reached a critical mass of my favorite authors admitting to straight plagiarizing Zamyatin’s “We” that I picked up and read it. I guess this must be the feeling one has if one consumed a lot of elves-and-orcs fiction before reading Lord of the Rings. Much more visceral and human, though.

I stopped on my run to cool off in the shade and was rewarded justly

University rankings are deeply problematic. But in an era where accreditors and AAUP don’t censure over lack of shared governance, a penalty by US News in their college rankings might be the only remaining stick. #AcademicSky

Box One is a bit of a banger

“It’s my weekend, too. I get to have a weekend,” I tell myself as I cuddle up with a book in the roots of a big oak tree at the school year-end family picnic

Overleaf labs making it possible to share a .bib across projects! Very helpful stuff for avoiding an issue where you haven’t grabbed the latest .bib from GitHub and now your versions are out of sync … www.overleaf.com/labs/partici...

And on my fourth day of being bedridden with a cold (?), I over exerted myself reading to my son. Time for more MST3K, I guess 🤷‍♀️

And we're full. But you can still sign up for the Super Social, which features a dance floor at the Great Lakes Science Center, until Monday! After Monday, you can only get tickets by swapping with someone who can no longer attend.

There are like 4 slots left. Last call, y'all.

New paper. Modern hagfishes (Myxiniformes) have radically reduced eyes. When did these reductions happen, and how? Leveraging the diverse hagfish fauna from Mazon Creek, we show this happened gradually in animals occupying shallow marine environments royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...

Oh, this looks quite convenient, especially the filtering and mimicking empirical matrices.

A visit

What a great review of where we're at with integrating paleoenvironmental info into biological models 🌋🗻🌏 www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

New work by methods-maven Anna Nagel (nage0178.github.io) on adapting likelihood-free deep-learning approaches for ancestral state estimation problems. Anna assessed how DL and Bayesian estimates compare (when possible) under various CTMC, SSE, and SIR models www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Years ago, I was told I was not allowed to assign “Weapons to Math Destruction” in my data science class in Louisiana and ceding to that demand is one of my chief life regrets.

My new paper with @gdarlim.bsky.social and @hoehna.bsky.social is now out in Proceedings B! We set out to compare two different approaches to time-calibrate a molecular phylogeny: traditional node calibrations, and unresolved FBD... @royalsocietypublishing.org doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

For Mother’s Day, my husband took the kids to El Paso from ABQ, gifting me a lovely day in the hotel doing my philosophy reading for a workshop this week. Took my Le Guin to the bar for dinner and thought about how it connects to readings I did Then looked up and saw Jeff Landry on 60 minutes 🤮

Oh my. This is spectacular. sinceyouarrived.world/taken

For years I've insisted that my dream job is working in an 18F-style software modernization office for higher ed. This is exactly why.

Le Guin’s anthropology of a culture that arises after the collapse of civilization in an ecological disaster Gonna have to sit with this one a while

“Choose your company wisely. And if you're choosing to work in an environment that isn't aligned with your values, find a community that comports with your values to keep you whole.”

> I'm going to get so much done today > what do you mean my backup system is broken

I know the goal of this image was to explain how far WMATA travels in a year, but what if it was an actual route

Genuinely my favorite professional service I’ve ever done. Interesting work, very different from our day-to-day, and everyone you work with is stellar

Any of my readers probably knows what a debt I owe to Cherryh. And if you don't, well, I'm telling you now. Go read something of hers if you're not familiar.

I’ve been worried about this in the context of already fragile research data ecosystems. More and more universities rely on “free” services like Google and ruthlessly prune “stale” accounts to stay under data caps. PIs are having to fight all these battles on every front.

Should we measure trait evolution in unit of time or in unit of substitutions? Our new paper in @evolletters.bsky.social looks at this from a theoretical perspective. #Evolution #Phylogenetics DOI: doi.org/10.1093/evle... 🧵 thread below 🧵

🪸🦕 📈 🪨 Excited to announce our upcoming workshop: Bridging Stratigraphic Palaeobiology & Phylogenetics, with Emilia Jarochowska, @niklashohmann.bsky.social, @rachelwarnock.bsky.social, and Johan Hidding 📍 Lorentz Centre, Leiden 📅 28 Sep – 2 Oct 2026 Applications open - details below 👇

Getting down to the wire on dorms. Dorms are one of the harder parts of the meeting to organize, but they are really important for cost and accessibility Don't wait if you need dorm housing!

The paper: Statistical and Structural Bias in Birth-Death Models by @phylieu.bsky.social & @omearabrian.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Last day for Mayr Award entry, and last day to be considered for inclusion in our sponsored symposium A few slots remain in the Society-sponsored Imageomics workshop Low-cost dorm housing nearly at capacity; virtual talks approaching capacity. Don't wait!

We really only have labor for ~130 regular contributed virtual talks. So, yes! Get those talks in! Late submissions decided via Thunderdome.

I am so unbelievably proud to present 8 years of hard work: the worlds oldest octopus is not an octopus... Pohlsepia is actually a really rotten Nautiloid (but oldest soft tissue nautiloid ever found!). 🐙❌ royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

One other thing I want to acknowledge is that I know there are difficult feelings about going back to Cleveland. This meeting was booked in 2020, as part of a negotiation to be able to reschedule our meetings due to the pandemic. In 2024, the Tri-Societies ratified a rubric for location choice 🧵

One cool thing about Cleveland is that it’s a strongly union town! The conv center plans for their people to have humane working hours. That means they need a little more info from us about space use, catering, etc earlier than normal. Unlikely we can extend early bird much if at all Don’t wait!

All women are all one very yucky behavioral thing being tolerated by our colleagues away from arming girls with fire