Excellent advice

To a first approximation, all Australian vertebrates are lizards. 🦎 But not just any lizards, Sphenomorphine skinks! With more than 280 species they are hyper variable. Now, Janne Torkkola has pulled together the biggest phylogeny of the group to date. Read for free: doi.org/10.1016/j.ym... 1/4

Robber baron culture has changed. John D. Rockefeller gave more in his lifetime than Elon has. In absolute dollars, not adjusted for inflation. I don’t think he was a good person, but he at least believed he was and tried to be.

How come none of you have ever informed me that Spotted Salamanders have a symbiotic relationship with algae that grow in their eggs (algae supply larvae with oxygen and sugar)? That algae may live within them and pass to future generations? www.scientificamerican.com/blog/artful-...

Not every brown snake in the UK is a Grass Snake. Adders have a bold zigzag and vertical slit pupils. Slow worms aren’t snakes at all (they’re legless lizards). Smooth snakes are rare and lack that yellow collar. Get to know them in our article! www.wildlifenomads.com/blog/facts-a...

The application deadline for the GSA Farouk El-Baz Student Research Grant is almost here! • Receive up to $3000 for your desert research 🌵 • No geographic restrictions • Open to undergraduate seniors and grad students Apply by 18 February 2026: geosociety.co/El-Baz

Don't count your chickens before they hatch. But also don't consider your eggs unviable before they've had a chance to incubate.

😍

Hugs and Hisses! Happy heart day #valentines #spicynoodleart #snake #scalie

Crime is her favorite thing - crime, and anything I'm eating. So tonight, for a V-day treat for me, I made myself a steak dinner. Medium top sirloin in a mushroom and red wine pan sauce, tangy mashed potatoes, roasted broccoli. She watched me eat it. Plotting. But she doesn't know I can plot too.

This #paleoart shows 3 views of the Devonian brachiopod fossil Paraspirifer bownockeri; one is reconstructed w/ some epifauna and boreholes. These are fun to find; they're an impressive size (for brachiopods). I had an excellent specimen to use as a reference for this painting. #FossilFriday #sciart

honey, it's time to share the dicynodont husbands again

昨日のバレンタインデーに貼り忘れたので。ハートの地衣類。白駒池のヒロハセンニンゴケ（2025年5月31日に撮影）。 #地衣類 Heart lichen. Baeomyces sp. Lake Shirakoma, Nagano (Photographed on May 31, 2025) #Lichen #FungiFriends

Happy Valentine's day from all the lizards who love you from the bottom of their obturator foramina! (lizard hip bones)🦎🧪💚

A lil ~romance~ in the unsorted Formicidae

Happy Bivalventines 💗 Heart cockles are the flatfish of bivalves, opening on their sides. They partner with symbiotic algae to get part of their nutrition! (327) photo source: carnegiemnh.org/warm-those-h...

Valentine's Day themed crab thread! ❤️🦀🦑🧪 The shamefaced heart crab, Cryptosoma bairdii, has nothing to be ashamed of because we love them (and in this photo, they love each other if you know what I mean) 1/7 Photo: Adrien Weckel doris.ffessm.fr/Especes/Cryp...

SVP Diversity Committee co-chair here. Feel free to dm me your thoughts. I’m working with DivComm and some other committees on an action plan and I’d love to know what you want to happen and what would make you feel safer, reassured, and welcome.

SVP has finally put out the statement they should have put out 9 days ago, instead of the disgraceful one they put out originally. This is better, but it's not enough. If SVP wants to regain its members' trust without increasing transparency, we need to see results, not promises.

Just in time for #FossilFriday, meet Rhynchaeites mcfaddeni, a little fossil ibis from the Green River Formation. The holotype looks delightfully like a hieroglyph! Published today in Journal of Paleontology shorturl.at/qTUVi

A pleasant reminder that at the root of our relatively stumpy-limbed modern crocodylians’ family tree are a bunch of reptilian greyhounds. This is a transformation about as dramatic as they come, but it never gets as much attention as it deserves.

If you thwart the sexual advances of a male bird that has a cloaca and not a penis, is it still a cock block?

Nominations are now OPEN for the Edward Forbes Prize! 🏆 We’re celebrating outstanding contributions by early career researchers in taxonomic and systematic palaeontology 🦴🌍 Know someone shaping the future of the field? Nominate them today! #Palaeontology #EarlyCareerResearch #Taxonomy

The Stuttgart Natural History Museum is offering a postdoc position (m/f/d) in Temnospondyl Geochemistry E 13 TV-L, 100 %, 2 years Application deadline: March 8th, 2026 ➡ Further information: https://t1p.de/nwrfi

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

Lolol the Dinocon statement was on Jimmy Kimmel.

[New Paper] @currentbiology.bsky.social presents our population genomics study of the iconic Scaly-foot Snail: 125 genomes from 8 Indian Ocean hot vents! Deep currents drive South→North gene flow, while transform faults act as dispersal barriers. READ FOR FREE: authors.elsevier.com/c/1mbW73QW8S...

Boopin

🚨 Hot off the press: Our look into of the palaeontological database landscape and its sustainability into the future. Palaeo databases are invaluable and continue to transform our research field - but they are vulnerable... (1/6) 🧪 ⛏️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Oops I accidentally spent three hours making a powerpoint presentation on phylogenetics and legless gecko diversity/appreciation. Look at how cute Aprasia inaurita is! 📷 Nick Volpe @nvolpe.bsky.social

Funny story: my career in drones exists because I have a arithmetic learning disability, tested awfully in math and couldn’t study STEM in college, and became so angered by how normal it was to look down upon non-tech people in the 2010s that I decided to master a hard tech field out of pure spite.

What’s the science behind super specific skin patterns in cetaceans? Obviously I know counter shading, but like… look at that Atlantic White-sided Dolphin. How is the skin yellow in that specific area? #whales #dolphin #ocean #art

Hi @paleobyliam.bsky.social, unfortunately in large public aquariums gars seem to be more prone to cataracts/eye issues like we see here. The fish is likely otherwise healthy, but eyesight definitely impeded. *I donated that gar to Shedd about 13 years ago (didn’t have eye issues back then).

Dinosaur swim tracks. These scratches were made by the clawed feet of dinosaurs similar to the little carnivore Coelophysis, around 200 million years ago, as the reptiles paddled in a lake’s shallows. Most dinosaur swim tracks described so far were made by carnivores. 🧪

#ProjectAnimalia 789: Cayenne caecilian (Typhlonectes compressicauda) A legless amphibian from South America! A bit overwhelmed this week, it was nice to escape into this dark texture. #sciart #dailyart #animalart #scientificillustration #medart #illustration #animalart #caecilian

Theres ample evidence that the ability to love evolved deep in the animal family tree.

Age verification? The Charmander I got from Professor Oak is old enough to be making one of these posts.

After a few years of benign neglect I am rebuilding bionames.org, which is a database of 5.4 million taxonomomic names for animals, linked to half a million DOIs and 278K PDFs. Dream is for every species name to be linked to its original publication using a persistent identifier #PID

Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs xkcd.com/3204/

Oh no. How sad. I can’t type my emails or do any work.

Question for the comparative biology #evodevo crowd, I know there’s a term for this but I’m blanking on what you would call an organ/trait that serves to radically different functions at distinct points in an organism’s life history.

🌿 Applications are open for the Bill Dahl Graduate Student Research Awards (GSRAs), including the J. S. Karling and AJ Harris awards. BSA supports graduate student research in botanical science with these $1,500 awards. Deadline: February 16, 2026. Apply now: botany.org/home/awards/...

I love these guys! I’ve seen their posture interpreted several different ways so this should be interesting!

Someone get this to all the king's horses ASAP! phys.org/news/2026-02...

Like last year, I’m going to rewatch the halftime show and then spend an hour or two unpacking all the references and symbolism. I love that we all get the chance to do this together and help each other out. Thank you to those who made guides. It’s like free form lit class!

Fuck ai for making me lie to my mother. My mom is experiencing cognitive decline and spends a lot of time scrolling facebook. She knows I like interesting animals so every few hours she excitedly shows me a slop video of a giant moth or a cat wearing impossible clothes. I can’t tell her it’s fake

I'm hearing PRI Museum of the Earth currently has an exhibit with LIVE Chittenango ovate amber snails, which are known only from the spray zone on the left side of a singular waterfall in New York State. I would go and visit if I was closer, but I figure some other people would be interested in this

Permian roots for angiosperms? 😳 I've seen hints of Triassic pollen and Jurassic flowers, but dang.

Regarding events of last week in SVP and the wider vertebrate paleontology community.

Concentration camps: “For 280 days we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, apple, orange, or anything fresh. We are all in one big room with no doors or windows. We can’t see any grass or trees. We are all constantly sick."