"I love them" -Charles Darwin talking about his pet pigeons

Everything Sucks Without Fossils (aka Davey Goes to College but you knew about that) 🧪🏴

Trait-space disparity in fish communities spanning 380 million years from the Late #Devonian to present www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #traits #fish #evolution #ecology 🌏🧪

PSA for paleontologists & geologists: be very careful swinging hammers! I severaly damaged my radial nerve while doing fieldwork this year and do not recommend it

Museums play a fundamental role in preserving cultural and natural history. They also educate the public, enrich our lives with knowledge, and inspire us to build a better future. The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see 🧪

As a paleontologist, here's something incredible about the geosciences program at OU: 1. Overall freshmen enrollment has been * increasing * in recent years. 2. We have more students in our * Paleobiology * Bachelor of Science program than any other option (including the general geosciences path)

Odd to me when people are like, "the world is burning why focus on positive things & good vibes?" Yeah, I know. But also everyone deserves to have something in this world that brings them joy. The universe is larger than the hellscape around us & I believe folks deserve beautiful, radiant things. 🧪

UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Do you know a mineralogist/petrologist/geochemist looking for a TT faculty position in a great department? The School of Geosciences at OU is seeking a TT Assistant Professor in the general fields of mineralogy, geochemistry, and petrology. Please share with anyone interested! 🧪🪨⛏️

Extinction is forever. These animals would be as much of a "real dodo" as the generative AI they used in their press release. I worry about the ethics of de-extinction & misinformation surrounding it. As one who loves pigeons (Columbidae), I also worry about the little genetically-modified squabs 🧪

I'm hoping to take 1 MSc & 1 PhD student next year in the areas of Phylogenetic, Computational, and/or Evolutionary Paleobiology. Please reach out if you are interested in joining the @oupaleobiology.bsky.social, especially if interested in working on fossil echinoderms. Link for more info below. 🧪

"New [fossil] evidence now reveals that the fundamental niche for great penguins includes much warmer environments." 🧪🐧

Tired: The biodiversity of the deep sea rivals the biodiversity of tropical rainforests. Wired: The biodiversity of the deep sea rivals the combined biodiversity of the entire rest of the planet.

If you're feeling an overwhelming sense of doom and desperately want to make the world a better place, if you're able, I suggest giving cash directly to the unhoused community and/or folks in need with no questions or conditions. In whatever way you can, just help someone out

Somewhere between "Know Your Rights" by The Clash and "Everything Sux" by the Descendents

"No way are we living in a dystopian hellscape" says area man sipping tea at the Chestnut Tree Cafe in Potemkin Village

As an ecologist, just putting here for the record that we are never going to have an AI model 'predict the future of biodiversity'.

Interesting. I've been doing what the authors refer to as a "semi-resolved analysis" in various manuscripts & projects since ~2017 because it intuitively seemed like it would lead to better FBD parameter estimates and * maybe * improve phylogeny inference. It never occurred to me to test it. Neat! 🧪

Although I'm somewhat biased (I have my reasons), Ectenocrinus is one of my favorite disparid crinoids from the Ordovician

New from #BiologyLetters: Combining fossil taxa with and without morphological data improves dated phylogenetic analyses buff.ly/abJm5Zv | #Evolution #Palaeontology #Taxonomy

As a paleontologist and macroevolutionary biologist, yeah I study Advanced D&D for a living (i.e., Divergence & Diversification) 🎲📈🧪

love the smell of fresh coffee and "manuscript accepted" emails in the morning ☕

This monograph describes 52 gastropods, including 25 new species/subspecies, from the Brightseat Formation of Maryland, which represents the earliest Paleocene sediments which crop out in this region of the northern Atlantic Coastal Plain.

Incredibly proud to see this project hit the light of day! Begun in the 1980s as the M.S. research of D. Govoni, I've led the charge with Dave the past few years to revise and expand his unpublished thesis and ensure that this diverse gastropod fauna received the formal description it deserved. 🧵

Congrats to Kiera! 🎉🎉🎉 This is her * 2nd * publication to come out in a month! Monographs are an immense amount of work. Taxonomic research contributes fundamental data to biodiversity science & forms the basis of all downstream research in paleobiological studies

My review of the evidence (morphological, embryological and molecular) for the deuterostomes clade is now available. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

If your work involves Big Palaeo Data, you should be *begging* people to publish little local studies of new observational data, jfc. Without that you have absolutely bupkiss. I say this as someone with a foot in both camps:

love the smell of fresh coffee and "manuscript accepted" emails in the morning ☕

The Cambrian marked the beginning of a fantastic flourishing that set the basis for life as we know it today. In my latest for Smithsonian, I take a peek at how everything from sea level changes to who ate whom underwrote life’s biodiversity burst.

that feeling when a cup of coffee is so good it warms the soul

Fossils for Future: the billion-dollar case for paleontology’s digital infrastructure DOI: doi.org/10.32942/X2D...

Well, none of us would be here without paraphyletic species...

"Even better than identifying the birds was identifying with the birds. I wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but I was sure it wasn’t the price of groceries or the impending demise of our democracy...I wanted more of this bird stuff, please"

Very excited that @oupaleobiology.bsky.social folks and I have registered to attend the upcoming 2026 @systbiol.bsky.social standalone meeting! Looking forward to workshops, talking science with friends & colleagues, and the panel discussions on the future of natural history collections #SSB2026

"I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me" September 10, 1941, birthday of paleontologist, biologist, author & historian of science Stephen Jay Gould 🦖

One of the great things about being at this stage in my career is that I get to choose who I work with and that means I think everyone I work with is really the fucking best and that makes doing science more fun

The dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus) resurrection that wasn't - Jensen‐Seaman - The Anatomical Record - Wiley Online Library anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Simon Wood, the GOAT of generalized additive models & creator of the mgcv #rstats package, has an Annual Review of Statistics essay on GAMs, available open access #statssky #mlsky www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Very sad to hear Mark Norell has passed away. He was a giant in specimen-based vertebrate paleontology and an absolute legend to all of us at the AMNH. His theoretical research in phylogenetics and the fossil record was inspirational to me when I was an undergrad contemplating future research ideas

Feeling the incalculable loss of Mark Norell (1957-2025): wonderful scientist and cherished friend. His influence will continue through his many mentees and the science he did and inspired.

We used to live in a society. Now we're just expendables in a world of AI slop. We were meant to be dancing animals.

"There’s a stereotype of a punk being this tough, tattoo-laden meathead. But in fact, many nerds ended up turning to punk because it was a way of releasing some of that frustration that they had for being nerds. Punks are the champions of the nerds." --Milo Aukerman (Descendents)

I just finished my favorite lecture of the year, in which I give my 105 students their first homework assignment (that I stole from Dave Jablonski): present the history of the Earth scaled to something with a distinct beginning, middle, end, etc. I made an example using Bohemian Rhapsody. There are…

The irony and shame that a group of disgraced academics wrote a garbage book about a manufactured 'war on science' that ultimately aids and abets a very different but actually real war on science and society

If you know anyone interested in starting a Master's project working on ammonoid phylogenetics (or the phylogenetics of a mollusc group spanning the OAE2 event in the Late Cretaceous), then ask them to get in touch with me. The situation is a little tricky, as it would be funded by the remainder…

These reasons and also because they are often extremely terrible at doing the very "services" they are supposed to provide, give heavily biased results, are easily used as a tool of oppression and manipulation by the billionaire class pushing AI, and has literally convinced people to kill themselves

As an Ohio State alum and football fan AND current OU faculty, I couldn't be happier that U. Michigan absolutely lost that game 😎

AMNH is hiring a #curator! We are searching for an “Assistant Curator in #Climate #Physics: #Atmosphere or #Ocean”! Join us! careers.amnh.org/postings/4579 #academicjobs #tenuretrack