Curious whether anyone knows if authors of scientific papers are members of this Class, or whether we signed that away to the publishers? Regardless, it's interesting to see which of my papers were used.

First official postdoc paper out in @jexpbiol.bsky.social! We compare different approaches to studying kinematics in a macaque ankle and note that the talocrural joint seems to contribute minimally to dorsiflexion of the foot during stance phase. journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Buried in the regime's political takeover letter of the Smithsonian is the worst bit. Unlike exhibits, which are non-destructive towards primary materials, temporary in nature, and reversible, the foundational collections are irreplacable. They want to be able to throw stuff out.

I am no constitutional scholar, but I can't help but feel that "the President gets to dictate what every university can teach and what every television station should broadcast" is closer to what the founding fathers were worried about when it comes to free speech than trigger warnings on syllabi.

One of the marvelous things about the United States - something it shares with Rome, I might add - is that American identity is fundamentally legal in definition and almost totally binary. Regardless of my politics or his, Zohran Mamdani, naturalized in 2018, is every bit as much an American as me.

Using ancestral state reconstructions to generate hypotheses about primate evolution and testing them against the fossil record. urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=htt... This has been in the works a long time and I'm really pleased to finally have it out! Thanks to all who contributed.

Musing: one side effect of constantly defending (eg an institution or a political party) against disinformation and bad faith criticism is that you can become habituated to ignoring all criticism (as bad faith), which makes it difficult to learn, adapt, grow, and address your actual weaknesses.

Population wide supplementation as a public health intervention is not new and has yielded incredible health benefits through the years don't let the misguided attacks on fluoridated water fool you. Why do you think iodide is added to table salt? Since we are intent of forgetting history here is a 🧵

“And I’m like, what do you mean, you ‘do your own research’? You running a double-blind study in your living room, dawg?” - A guy walking ahead of me with his friends on a NYC sidewalk in 2021, also my favorite overheard dialogue of the entire pandemic

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

TLDR: the administration wants to remove habitat loss from the definition of "harm" for endangered species, which will effectively gut the ESA. I just commented. If you're in any way interested in ecology, nature, and the protection of endangered species, you should, too. Free daily action!

New paper on evolvability in apes, and whether it can help us make sense of the messy evolution of locomotion in that group. My results suggest a feedback effect between integration and the response to selection. We need more research on how integration evolves! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A tool to quickly match taxon names between a dataset and a phylogenetic tree, built for folks doing phylogenetic comparative analyses: github.com/spearw/phylo...

This is how I tend to think about our history, to be honest: the story of American greatness is a story of overcoming the flaws in our republic. And there are periods of retreat and backlash, but in the past, we've always renewed the quest for that more perfect union.

If you let them do this to immigrants - again *legal* immigrants - you will have *no way* to know when they start doing it to citizens. They'll feed you the exact same lies and refuse to disclose the identities of the people disappeared (as they're doing now).

Letter to leadership of universities being targeted, to run in Chronicle tomorrow. Academic friends, pls sign if you are a US citizen and tenured (ie it’s safe for you to do so) “We Must Leverage the Strength of Our Institutions and Stand Together” Text in replies docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

🧪 The NSF director is lying to you. Let’s fact check 7 claims from yesterday’s letter to the community, while pointing out 3 critical omissions. 🧵

As JFK famously said, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. Unless they have the gall to say facts to my face. Then f*** 'em."

Congrats to Eva on her first paper! Thanks for involving me in this research. The big takeaway is that, unfortunately, it is a lot harder to predict lower back length from pelvis measurements than we'd like it to be, complicating interpretations of fossils: authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

New paper doing a GM analysis of lumbar vertebrae in Miocene apes. Short version: Morotopithecus and Pierolapithecus fall into the overlap between gibbons and spider monkeys, while Ekembo falls with terrestrial papionins like baboons and short tailed macaques. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The Democrats on the House Science Committee have set up a website to collect stories from fired federal employees, anonymously if desired. Please amplify. (This helps the lawyers establish standing for bringing legal cases against the administration!) democrats-science.house.gov/sciencefirings

Our new paper announcing a freely available database of 3D scans of primate skeletal material--a major effort led by Sergio Almécija & his team at the American Museum of Natural History. 🧪 🏺 #paleosky #anatomy #primates #anthropology #morphology #zoology #paleoanthropology #openscience

Great article arguing that scientists must be active advocates for our respective fields and science as a whole. To add a small piece, I think it’s important to further differentiate between advocacy that builds public support/goodwill for the field and advocacy that spends public support/goodwill.

Joined the cool kids and made a starter pack - this one with people that research mammalian form and function. Tag yourself or others in the replies and I'll add you! 🧪

New paper from my dissertation! What forelimb traits are actually associated with suspension in primates (fewer than you'd think)? Does it matter how much suspension is used (yes)? How good are we at figuring out function from comparative analyses (not very)? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...