Reptiles with longer Wikipedia pages tend to be bigger. The relationship is a power law with exponent = 0.85. I guess humans really like writing about big lizards? The longest article is the Komodo Dragon.

If you spoke Old English and were boiling something, you'd use the verb sēoþan – from which English today gets two very distinct words: - From its infinitive/present tense, we get 'seethe', now used for strong emotions. - From its past participle ġesoden ('boiled, cooked'), we also get 'sodden'.

I am currently in a restaurant, and a group of my countrymen are giving the US such a terrible name. First, the volume. I am FOUR TABLES AWAY. I should not be able to hear every word. They hate Scottish food, and they are -- loudly -- speculating that they will hate this food too.

Job alert! Apply via www.bto.org/jobs Are you passionate about birds with an interest in data and admin? We're looking for someone to join our Surveys Team and support UK bird surveys. 📆 Full time, Permanent. 📍 Thetford, Norfolk (Hybrid). 📝 £29,754 per annum. Closing date: Sunday 7 June

One of my alma maters is able to track changes in my address literally faster than my own employer. The other just invited me to an alumni event in... *checks notes*...Singapore. Comrades. What. (Both still refer to me as "Miss", which is frustrating. Surely universities understand doctorates?)

New paper @thepalass.bsky.social led by PhD student Ana Laura Paiva (with @pedrolgodoy.bsky.social, @paleodaniel.bsky.social & others) estimating body size in notosuchian crocodylomorphs, with implications for extinction selectivity across the K/Pg mass extinction: doi.org/10.1111/pala...

Looks like a fantastic postdoc...deadline soon 'Greenland Institute of Natural Resources seeks a Postdoctoral Researcher with experience in vegetation mapping and herbivory' Drones, traits and Greenland #PostDocJobs naalakkersuisut.emply.net/recruitment/... 🧪🌐🌾

5 days left to apply for PhD and Postdoc positions in a cool project about herbaria, plants and digitization!🌿😎 Postdoc: jobs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/jobposting/9... PhD: jobs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/jobposting/c... More info: cordis.europa.eu/project/id/1... #Jobs #HPBio #HistSci #DigitalHumanities #PhilSci

Happy to see my PhD work on birdsong complexity published today! doi.org/10.1098/rspb... 🐦‍⬛ 🎶 ⬇️ Why are some birdsongs simple and some extremely complex? The answer is long thought to be ‘sexual selection favouring complex signals’. But - really?

Well, I've caught up with one thing, at least.

My former officemate Camille Troisi, an excellent scientist and top-tier human, now at the Université de Rennes, is currently recruiting a PhD student on the relationship between urbanisation and social learning (in birds!) sdrive.cnrs.fr/s/2HtQ8caBRd...

Seriously, the number of people who respond to BES Macro emails being like "uhhh, this is a generic cluster/department/uni/whatever email address and presumably not meant for us" is staggering. Tell conferences your email!

Come join us! We have a one-year, part-time, education-focussed Assistant Professor post in Palaeobiology. Deadline for applications is 2nd June 2026. Please see more at the below link: edzz.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Child language development expert here. No. The answer is absolutely not. So-called baby talk is culturally specific. Developing language is not. #linguistics

I'm half an hour into a seven-hour hike, and I already feel like death 😂. At least the weather's gorgeous?

Oh shit. With all the DOGE cuts to USAID and CDC — this is going to be… very bad. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Joy of the moment: puffins on the puffin cam! www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt3M...

Me @ my inbox every morning

My response to learning basically anything about language 😂

If you aren't getting a decent amount of rejections, you aren't aiming high enough. dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2026/05/13/o...

Cock-of-the-rock

Beautiful new preprint from Antonio and Andres on the evolution of eye loss in spiders! Find the full thread below for details on unequal losses across parallel visual systems, possible regains of eyes, 1000s of surveyed species, ecological and developmental clues, and a gratuitous dinosaur emoji 🦕

I can both totally see how Wiley came up with this alert, but also, Wiley, truly: what.

Smithsonian Fish Curator position announcement! Note the application dates of May 12 – June 2, 2026. Should be posted here tomorrow: trustcareers.si.edu#js-careers-j...

Oof, that's a graph.

Last chance to apply to be our Biological Data Manager! Visit www.bto.org/jobs to submit your application! 📆 Full time, Permanent 📝 £32,952 per annum 📍 HQ in Thetford, Norfolk (hybrid role) Deadline for applications: Sunday 17 May #Ornithology

babe, wake up, new canonical regression discontinuity example just dropped

🚨New paper alert!🚨 (only slightly delayed). I'm proud to have been a part of this cool work led by Dr. Marco Rego. Marco assembled a massive dataset of bird distributional information to test long-standing ideas about how rivers serve as taxon boundaries in the Amazon Basin. Check out those maps!

I love the NHS, but also, sometimes I hate it. Me: Hello, this is a repeat prescription I've been taking for years, and that you won't let me stock up on. May I please have a refill? Them: Nope :-) Me: Cool. Any chance you could give me enough that I could wean myself off? Them: Nope :-)

In theory, I'm currently within about 100 m of a pair of puffins. In practice, I have not yet found the puffins.

On the one hand, I have now driven independently in the UK! Yay! On the other hand, omfg driving in the UK is so scary. (They gave me a super wide car, aaah.) (You: Catherine, weren't you fine driving in Ireland literally two weeks ago? Me: Look, I don't make the rules.)

Beautiful motion capture of alpaca.

Okay let me summarise the English voter ID discourse for everyone not resident here: For literally centuries: no voter ID required The Tories, a couple years ago: “voter ID is now mandatory! We are only accepting forms of ID statistically carried mostly by old white wealthy citizen men”

For anyone panicking over hantavirus, I highly recommend this thread from the only person on planet earth who could keep me sane during COVID with actual fact and science based communication.

Me: *trying to do a task I've successfully accomplished dozens of times, including literally on Monday* Computer: no.

I voted in the UK for the very first time today! One of my friends laughed at me when I said that I was gonna get up really early to do it -- turns out it takes like 2 minutes, polling station super close by, no queues at all, extremely straightforward.

University higher ups should have to teach one class a week so they realise: 1. Most students don't watch the online vids or do the modules 2. Attendance is patchy and mediocre at best 3. Their technofantasy of how 'the kids' use tech is ridiculously at variance w reality 4. COVID still impacts

Also, happy voting day! If you're eligible, please go vote!

I was sent a non-urgent email at 4:14 PM yesterday. At 8:23 AM I received a cranky request to respond. Bruh. Cool your jets. (Also, "Dear Prof. [male name] and Ms. Sheard"? Absolutely not. Either give both of us academic titles or neither of us, for the love of God.)

New opening for a postdoctoral researcher in PhenoBees project (Finnish Museum of Natural History) jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...

A Harvard study just published estimates Elon Musk's destruction of USAID has already caused 600,000 deaths 2/3 of them children. That is his legacy in this world.

A number of coronal hole "blobs" are facing Earth now with one of the western features about to become geoeffective probably within the next 24 hours. There are no G-scale watches out now, but G0-G1 (Kp 4-5) conditions are possible today-Friday, imo.

Between 2024 and 2026, Facebook hosted over 75% of all wildlife products found for sale online. Over half are endangered or critically endangered. Researchers say the platform’s architecture and algorithms that suggest related content, allows illegal networks to thrive. Spoorthy Raman reports.

the thing that is just the most frustrating final piece here is that MAHA types scream about "no Big Pharma, just vitamins!!" and this is *literally just a damned vitamin* it really shows how it's not actually about vitamins or whatever- they want to be contrarian AND correct in all things

Ray-finned fishes are famously diverse, but we know little about their brains or cranial endocasts. @rodrigoichthys.bsky.social opens this black box with a dice-CT survey of 86 species across the actinopt tree of life. #OA in @royalsocietypublishing.org 🐟🧠 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

📖 Published📖 charisma: An R package to perform reproducible colour characterization of digital images for biological studies🖥️ 🌍 🧪 👇️ buff.ly/bIUBOck

Spatial distribution of acoustic traits in bird assemblages along regional bioclimatic gradients vist.ly/536zb #Birds #Song #Urbanisation

Check out our (@sobchuk.bsky.social) special issue on the cultural evolution of the arts in Evolutionary Human Sciences, with papers from @mikekestemont.bsky.social @babeheim.bsky.social @svalver.bsky.social and more! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

What the actual fuck.