Our work on mammalian hallucal grasping, led by Irene Montañez-Rivera during her time in the @johnnyakatura.bsky.social group, is out now in iScience. A true team effort; thanks to the whole crew for inviting me to contribute a small piece! www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Our special issue of the @journalofanatomy.bsky.social (co-edited by Virginia Abdala and me) on the evolution of joints in vertebrates is out now — check it out! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14697580...

So glad to have been interviewed for this story! I stand by it ⚰️🔨 See the article below and the original paper by Ned Snelling and colleagues for more info on the increasingly dubious connection between high oxygen and griffenfly size 😎

𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐬𝐚𝐮𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐭𝐡𝐲𝐨𝐬𝐚𝐮𝐫𝐬? Well, we’ve always assumed they did (and for good reason), but there’s been surprisingly little direct evidence to support this assumption. In a new paper, we describe an unassuming little Jurassic fossil that directly confirms it: doi.org/10.3374/014....

PhD candidate!! Congratulations to Miranda Margulis-Ohnuma 🤩🐟🐍 working with her has been the best part of my four years at Yale.

we did 3177 playback experiments on 264 species of birds to learn why males alone defend territories in some species while pairs team up to cooperatively defend home turf in others. and now you can read about it with writing that is fun theconversation.com/its-a-sing-o...

Final conference as a postdoc featured lots of bird anatomy with Casey Holliday, Emma Schachner, and Dominique Homberger; green chile everything; and a detour to the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. Thanks to @crocholliday.bsky.social for the symposium invitation!

Excited to visit UToronto this week for the famous Atwood Symposium! 🦎🦎🦎

Very proud of my incoming PhD student, Joanna Baker, for receiving the NSF GRFP! She worked extremely hard on her application and I'm very much looking forward to her joining my lab @gtsciences.bsky.social this year.

We are also pleased to announce the Dobzhansky Prize Honorable Mention, Dr. Sean Anderson! Learn more about his work: www.evolutionsociety.org/news/display... @seananderson.bsky.social

We're hiring a *post doc*! Are you a global change ecologist (broadly defined) and want to work with Jenny McGuire, @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social, me & many others?!🦎🐦🦴⛰️ Come join an amazing, hungry, and very exciting eco-evo group here at GT! careers.hprod.onehcm.usg.edu/psc/careers/...

Join us for our first CNB virtual mini symposium 🐓🏃🏻‍♀️! future events suited to additional time zones coming soon; join our mailing list on our website (link in flyer) to stay in the loop.

Huge congratulations to my mentee, Miranda Margulis-Ohnuma, for winning the @sicb-dcb-dvm.bsky.social D. Dwight Davis Award for Division of Vertebrate Morphology best student talk at this year's @sicb.bsky.social meeting! So pleased to see her creativity recognized 🐍 sicb.org/sicb-news/co...

At the RVC we are grieving the death of the Structure & Motion Lab's creator, and stalwart comrade, Professor Alan Wilson FRS, from a plane crash in Namibia on Wednesday. He was a giant in comparative biomechanics and an amazing scientist. I'm still reeling. It is utterly shocking and deeply sad.

Reporting the death of Prof Alan M. Wilson FRS in a light plane crash in Namibia, while doing wildlife research. He was 62. He built and flew his own planes but I do not know if he either built or flew this one. He even flew from London to Cromer to meet me for lunch (he brought cake). Devastated.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10

!!! happy, pleased, and generally floored to be a #SloanFellow. this means more getting out into nature to figure out how mountain birds are responding to climate change

Incredibly cool preprint on empirical fitness seascapes 🌊 by Swathi Nachiar Manivannan & @cbo.bsky.social – if you like thinking about adaptive landscapes, a must-read.

Had a great seminar visit with the crew at Ohio University — thanks to Susan Williams, @witmerlab.bsky.social, and Peishu Li for a very fun start to the week!

Excited to share that our co-edited volume on the Iron Age Philistine cemetery from Ashkelon is now out! This volume presents the bioarchaeological findings from the c. 250 individuals, each with a dedicated catalogue entry that synthesizes their stratigraphic, osteological & artifactual contexts.

Had lots of fun delivering the @sicb-dcb-dvm.bsky.social Carl Gans award lecture yesterday at @sicb.bsky.social #SICB2026! Grateful to have the support of so many incredible colleagues in comparative biomechanics.

JEB is proud to be sponsoring the 2026 @sicbjournals.bsky.social Carl Gans Lecture by Armita Manafzadeh @armanafzadeh.bsky.social at 13:30 in Oregon 201, the Oregon Convention Center Dr Manafzadeh's lecture is entitled 'Joints: form, function, and the future of comparative biomechanics'

🧪🐠 I am hiring a postdoc! Work will be on patterns of biodiversity across phylogenetic scales using teleost fishes as a model. Apply by end of Jan 2026 for full consideration apply.interfolio.com/179070 I encourage folks to reach out with any questions. Please Share!

The Vertebrate Paleontology students did a great job 3D printing and painting skulls—look at that homology!

Congratulations, @caleb-m-gordon.bsky.social et al.! Such creative work; nothing more satisfying than a good cross-field method-repurposing.

Hey everyone! I’m excited to share that one of my thesis projects was just published in @currentbiology.bsky.social and featured on phys.org! In this paper, we use an old statistical approach developed by the US Navy in WW2 to predict the aquatic habits of various dinosaurs and marine reptiles 🦖🐊

Looking forward to joining the @royalsociety.org Proceedings B editorial board in 2026 – send us your papers!

Excited to have the opportunity to share my perspective on comparative biomechanics in a plenary at this year's SICB meeting. Grateful to my mentors/collabs/students for their support along the way, and very honored to receive the Gans Young Investigator Award!

the word that best captures my feelings about receiving the Duke University 2025 Outstanding Postdoc award is just grateful grateful to sheila for the opportunity to grow as a scientist and grateful for my students for teaching me more than they know @dukepostdocs.bsky.social @snpatek.bsky.social

Happy to share 2 more patellofemoral papers out of Fulkerson group: (1) On the importance of studying TTTG in 3-D to personalize treatment www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... (2) Dr. Fulkerson sharing his updated perspective on surgical planning for TTOs journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New: After a long wait, the GRFP solicitation is live! Deadlines have been extended to early November, so applicants have a bit over a month to submit. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

An exciting update on the human joint side – we found that lateral patellar tracking and malalignment are correlated with progressive cartilage damage, and that the 3D metrics we've been developing to describe PF morphology can be used to quantify the risk. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The GRFP lives!! (due end of October) www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Come and be our new Chair of Biology at @gtsciences.bsky.social! We are growing an incredibly exciting ecology and evolution group here at GT and would love a visionary eco-evo minded person at the helm to help us do that. Please spread the word! biosciences.gatech.edu/chair-search

I'm recruiting a PhD student to join the lab at @gtsciences.bsky.social in Fall 2026! Broad taxonomic and topical freedom under the umbrella of vertebrate joint form and function. Information here: www.manafzadeh.com – please share 🦴🩻

I'm recruiting a PhD student to join the lab at @gtsciences.bsky.social in Fall 2026! Broad taxonomic and topical freedom under the umbrella of vertebrate joint form and function. Information here: www.manafzadeh.com – please share 🦴🩻

New Comparative Anatomy Textbook! Completely free to read and open access! doi.org/10.59319/YHF...

✨Some news✨: after finishing my postdoc, I’ll be starting my lab as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech. Join us in Atlanta to study how joints work and where they come from!

Our paper on entry point-transition point angle elevation in patellofemoral instability patients, led by PhD student Johannes Sieberer and featuring his awesome Python/C# 3D curvature visualization tool (zenodo.org/records/1121...), is out now in OJSM: doi.org/10.1177/2325...

✨Some news✨: after finishing my postdoc, I’ll be starting my lab as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech. Join us in Atlanta to study how joints work and where they come from!

Great writeup by @caleb-m-gordon.bsky.social! 🐢

A nice conceptual summary of what we’ve learned so far in the Fulkerson group about the importance of studying kneecaps in 3D, led by med student Nancy Park (who just matched ortho at Duke — congrats, Nancy!!), is out today in Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy Review: journals.lww.com/sportsmedart...

Very much looking forward to this symposium (even though I'll be Zooming in while everyone's in Bordeaux). Thanks to @hugodutel.bsky.social for the invitation!

🗓️ Save the date! 26-28 May 2025 | Université de Bordeaux, France. Symposium and workshop : Biomechanical simulation techniques in evolutionary morphology and biomedical sciences. More info and registration: www.eventbrite.fr/e/1263754958...

Our latest Fulkerson group paper, led by student J. Sieberer, is out in The Knee (my favorite journal name yet). We create & test an AI-driven workflow to automatically calculate patellar tilt in 3-D, facilitating clinical diagnosis of patellar instability. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We are recruiting trainees for the Integrative Movement Sciences Summer Institute. Students will gain research experience in dynamic muscular control of movement across organizational scales from molecular mechanisms to whole-body movement in complex environments. Learn more: tinyurl.com/5n7w6pey

I'm the guest editor on this special issue on TBI. Awesome work from the Dean lab 🧪 💀

Our paper led by Mike Schindler is out #OA in @anatrecord.bsky.social. We explore how the craniofacial hinge joint balances mobility & stability in helmeted hornbills, birds w/ high-impact head-butting behavior. Thanks to Mason Dean for inviting me to join the fun! tinyurl.com/595v6dzz

So proud of Dr. @caleb-m-gordon.bsky.social, PhD for his successful dissertation defense yesterday. Listening to the way Caleb talks about his research reminds us all of why we got into this business to begin with. Congratulations, Dr. Gordon 🐬🦖

Finally took a trip on the ferry to hang out with the anatomy crew down at Stony Brook — thanks so much to Kimi Chapelle and Drew Moore for the invitation!!