Once again convincing myself this will be the year my beloved NY Mets won't self-destruct their season into ignominy

The promise of a beer and ballgame in the near future is doing a lot of emotional heavy lifting these days.

they should invent emails that find me well

Just a heads up that I and many other people are much more block happy on here than I was on twitter. It's something that developed early in the culture of this app. I feel no need to justify it. If you're being weird, creeping me out, I don't like the vibe, you're rude, speaking in bad faith, BLOCK

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

they should invent a kind of news that's good

Limitations of molecular dating using constant birth-death rate priors in deep time reflected in Brachiopoda evolution www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"People knock on my door Ringing my phone Telling me the things I gotta get done today To satisfy them, but what about me? Lately I've been wishing I was brain dead No responsibilities in my head today"

Encountered the phrase "luxury AI" and I've had enough

I genuinely like Star Wars > Star Trek but also totally agree with the poll

"Fossils are another major theme in Pokémon"

It absolutely destroys me every time I see this happen

I continue to be fascinated by the phenomenon whereby an expert engages with any of the LLMs on their field of expertise and is instantly horrified by the wrong answers, and then goes on to use it for things they are not experts in as though it won’t be just as bad for those.

I love studying fossils and biological evolution so much. I'm incredibly grateful (and lucky) to be a paleontologist for a living

Very cool! They played this song when I saw them last year in OKC. Their set list was *very* old school punk (a lot from Mommy's Little Monster but very few country influenced songs of later albums). Mike Ness was was a force on stage and just as angry as ever at systems of injustice and inequality

Seems too early but I swear I heard a Hermit thrush singing this morning

Cambrian Explosion vs. Cambrian Radiation?

Our new paper 'A covarion model for phylogenetic estimation using discrete morphological datasets,' is out in SysBio! We introduce the "covariomorph" model in RevBayes to capture character and lineage specific rates of morphological traits. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

Sometimes when you stare into the abyss of geologic time, the abyss stares back. The Ordovician trilobite Calyptaulax from the OMNH collections. Like modern insects, trilobites had compound eyes with many lenses. The lenses are made of calcite, which also makes up the exoskeleton. #TrilobiteTuesday

Oh. It took me long enough to get around to listening to it, but the new Dropkick Murphys album is really good

At this point in life I'm committed to drinking coffee and going birding for...uh...health reasons. No I won't be looking into it further

Incredibly sad to learn Hans-Dieter Sues passed away. Hans was very kind and extremely encouraging to me in our interactions during my years at the Smithsonian. A major loss for paleo department at the NMNH, the discipline of paleobiology in general, and everyone who knew his kindness and laughter

You, an individual, cannot "fix" the whole world. You can act at the scale of your life. You should act at the scale of your life.

Today is the 40th anniversary for The Legend of Zelda. Released for Famicom/NES, the first title in Nintendo's highly successful adventure series introduces protagonist Link, who is tasked with saving the Kingdom of Hyrule and Princess Zelda from Ganon. #RPGanniversary

"Alternative science hypotheses and hard thinking represent the very core of good science; good science is not always 'easy'. I doubt if anyone has ever received a Nobel Prize for testing a null hypothesis." --David Anderson in Model-Based Inference in the Life Sciences (2008, p. 164) 🧪

#FossilFriday Presented to the British Museum in 1875 and now in the Natural History Museum, Ordovician brachiopods cover the surface of this small piece of Cincinnatian limestone from Waynesville, Ohio.

Very proud of the @paleosoc.bsky.social for advocating a safer & more welcoming community for all paleontologists

Gentle reminder: Whether it's me or literally anyone else on social media, you're not obligated to follow or interact with folks who bring you down or choose not to engage with you in good faith. Some folks are miserable and want you to be miserable too

"Beer, uh, finds a way." -Dr. Ian Malcolm (probably)

Oh hey that's me, @leptaena.bsky.social, Melanie Hopkins, and other AMNH colleagues! I * think * we were very excited about finding a large number of well-preserved cyclocystoid echinoderms when this photo was taken

"My observations are necessarily imperfect, but they afford the development of new analytical methods a more competent scientist may find useful for their research, and to arrive at absolutely breathtaking and irrefutable conclusions, which I in my ignorance of mathematics must leave to others."

I believe papers about extinct charismatic vertebrates should be held to the same publishing standards and norms as other taxonomic groups. It's objectively bizarre that papers describing a single species gets published in Science/Nature as if that's considered of broad paleobiological significance

I can tell I've curated my social media feeds because I learned about the new Spinosaurus paper, which I have not seen or read, via accounts either ripping on the PCA plot and/or pointing out the problematic folks on the author list

We just don't end papers like this any more. Maybe the world would be better if we did? ⚒️🧪

Not fussed about Spinosaurs, but I do like PCAs. I do not like this PCA

Well, this is a bit of a plot twist.

The horror of 'smiling' fossil crinoids will either keep you awake at night or haunt you in your dreams

New preprint on a new diversity-dependent biogeographic diversification model using deep learning. Joint work with my amazing advisor @landismj.bsky.social. Details of the paper in the comment section. #evobio www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

People can say it’s utopian or dreamy but it’s a fact that you have to believe new things are possible, fundamentally, in order to make them real. You have to make the choice to believe that more than this is possible & not be resigned to this being the way things have to be because it’s not at all.

Not to be a cladist about it there should be regularly scheduled PSAs to paleontologists warning them about the dangers of investigating evolutionary trends of polyphyletic taxa

UMMP is hiring: Administrative Assistant Senior position with primary duties related to administrative support, collections and publications compliance, and museum outreach and communications work. careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

"Palaeontology is a science and these days you need some maths and computer skills and the more the better...[which] will be of far, far more use to you at university and beyond in a career than learning the names of dinosaur species or the exact age of a given formation."

Here it is, your moment of zen.

Writing is thinking. It's not some marginal boring task you can skip. It's the heart of it.

**It is important to understand that cultivating a class of intellectually powerful scientists who are given lots of cash and little social accountability is a structural feature that Epstein was taking advantage of, not inventing.** 🧪🔭⚛️

Crush Your Oppressors More angry art and then back to my serene piece. You can now order prints, stickers, and apparel at the usual haunts. Prints and Stickers: www.emmalerae.com/store.html Apparel: emmalerae.threadless.com

#Phylogenetics slides - still wonder if my students will get this right on the exam

"Billionaires really like thinkers who see their exploitation of the weak as a good & natural thing." Evolutionary biologists have a responsibility to oppose the unscientific, deeply unethical, & immoral promulgations of billionaire-funded, pseudoscientific eugenics pablum glorifying exploitation

NEW: Read this terrific piece @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social for @thenerve.news in which she unpicks Edge.org, the hugely influential 'salon' funded by Epstein & threaded through with race science & eugenics. 1/ www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-bi...

Not sure who needs to hear this, but there are multiple academic societies around the world that center the science of paleontology, as well as other scientific societies and academic conferences focused on evolution, systematics, and ecology where research on fossils is welcome