Compared to trilobites, what is man

Absolutely overjoyed to share our new paper describing the oldest occurrence of soft-tissue preservation in crinoid echinoderms and their ecological significance 🧪

Cannot explain how much I love using fossils to study biological evolution & the history of life. From writing code for computational analyses, working with museum specimens, or writing scientific papers, I truly enjoy the process of *doing* science. I'm so incredibly lucky to be a paleontologist

Here's a summary image showing some of the tube feet preserved

Excited to share my newest paper with @daveyfwright.bsky.social and colleagues on soft tissue preservation of tube feet in an Ordovician crinoid! doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

Absolutely overjoyed to share our new paper describing the oldest occurrence of soft-tissue preservation in crinoid echinoderms and their ecological significance 🧪

"Hereditarians put load-bearing weight on a verbal theory and gesture toward correlations, but fail to follow through on the quantitative work that makes or breaks evolutionary and genetic hypotheses." tl;dr: mathematical evolutionary theory demonstrates race science is fundamentally incorrect

It doesn't make sense to expect dinosaurs/extinct life in fiction to be "scientifically accurate" if you're not also expecting "scientific accuracy" in other aspects of science, like genetics, development, biochemistry, or literally the laws of physics (e.g., time travel, etc.). Let people have fun

I know I've done my fair share of complaining about the accuracy of movie dinosaurs. It even led me to work with the Jurassic World franchise. But I've got to say, I'm tired of it. I'm tired of every dinosaur movie having to be tested for 'accuracy' when many of us nerds love dino pop anyway.

🧨 New publication out (I think this one is 🌶️ ): Cerca & @stelkens.bsky.social - "The identity crisis of speciation genomics". academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

Russell Vought, Director of the OMB, has issued a set of proposed changes that would dramatically alter federal grant funding. However, we can each take action to prevent these from taking effect. Here's how, a 🧵 🧪 1/n www.science.org/content/arti...

I know absolutely no one on BlueSky cares but damn Social Distortion's new album is fire 🔥. And their cover of Wicked Game is incredible

Would love reporters to be able to perform their basic job of...reporting

🌈 Diversity makes our community stronger The Paleo Society appreciates each one of you who makes science richer and more welcoming. Happy Pride Month! 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️

“.. The U.S. is now spending more on data center construction than on public transportation infrastructure, according to new Census Bureau figures out today.” @bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I'll allow fish but only in the paraphyletic sense

because Jurassic Park is trans rep

Echinoderms are my research thing but I gotta admit that trilobites, snails, and brachiopods are all such cool litte guys

Happy Pride Month! Did you know, palaeontology has more queer people than average population! Over 30% in Early Careers! 1 in 3 junior palaeontologist you'll meet, will be queer. This stat drops with seniority. Palaeontology underperforms across all other diversity metrics otherwise. 🧵

During a grad school interview, a faculty member asked where I grew up & then wanted to talk about sailboats. I said I didn't know anything because only rich people had them. His attitude changed and he rudely (and repeatedly) demanded to know why I believed I belonged in a "prestigious" program lol

The head of admissions for my dream graduate program told me the only contribution I'll make to science would be as a lab tech at best. I can't emphasize enough: this is my academic origin story. 🧪

Every time I wear a Descendents shirt in public, someone (ranging from younger Zoomers to older Gen Z) inevitably compliments "oh wow nice shirt". This doesn't happen with any other band shirt I own

Trigonotarbids are some of my favorite fossil arthropods!

it’s because LLMs have no relationship to the truth. LLMs do not and cannot think or evaluate or decide or understand anything. the only things LLMs do is make sentences that seem like sense-making sentences, by choosing the most statistically likely next word in their input data set. THAT IS ALL.

Welp, Knicks in 4 am I right?!

One of the only near universals is that almost everyone has an issue with NBA officiating

"We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope" --Stephen Jay Gould (from The Mismeasure of Man)

tl;dr: There never was a paradox of the organism. It was just a mistake about genes. But genetic conflicts do occur and are fascinating. This is also an invitation: if you like the selfish-gene idea, I'd love to hear why. What biological reality does the metaphor capture?

tl,dr; Scientists no longer allowed to use federal funding to publish, attend meetings, or talk to the public. They cannot collaborate internationally. Grants can be cancelled for any reason, at any time, political appointees have a final say over what gets funded, and who gets funded.

To the tune of Wendy by The Beach Boys: "Oh Wemby, Wemby leave Shai alone" #ThunderUp 🏀

We as a society are back to appreciating pigeons for the magnificent wonders they are!

Pigeons on the cover of Science. We're so back

Incredible window view of NYC from the Division of Invertebrate Paleontology at the AMNH

📣 Introducing MorphSim: an R package for simulating discrete morphological data along phylogenetic trees, built for fossil-inclusive phylogenetics, with all the complexity of real morphological data baked in 🪨🌿 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Oh, this looks quite convenient, especially the filtering and mimicking empirical matrices.

Incredible window view of NYC from the Division of Invertebrate Paleontology at the AMNH

Great day for @oupaleobiology.bsky.social folks to visit the AMNH!

Now think about all the fossil crinoids I share. They would have had these same bright colors as the modern species. It would have been stunning to see a forest of living crinoids on the ancient Ordovician sea floor.

From colder climates.. SO MANY FEATHER STARS! Florometra serratissima from British Columbia! #comatulidstoday www.inaturalist.org/observations...

Back in New York City one day and feel so back home. I freakin' love this place

Went to the Yale Peabody Museum and found my friends (echinoderms and fish) hanging out together

When I teach my non-majors History of Life class to college freshman, I preface a lecture on contingency and Gould's famous quote by explaining what "tapes" are/were and what Gould meant

Pioneering palaeontologist Mary Anning was born #OnThisDay in 1799. Already ground-breaking by aged 12, she discovering the first correctly-identified ichthyosaur skeleton and helped revolutionise our understanding of the prehistoric Earth. She always worked with her dog, Tray. #WomenInSTEM

This #BiodiversityDay, support open biodiversity knowledge for global impact 🌱 🔗 🌏 🧪 Please consider supporting the people, infrastructure & partnerships that connect locally digitized biodiversity literature with a global audience. Donate: ancrywkv.donorsupport.co/page/BHLat20 #BHLat20 #ILoveBHL

A very bright and sunny day to visit the Yale Peabody Museum! 🦕

The New Paleobiology Database User Guide is here! This is the second edition of the volume designed to be a comprehensive guide for Paleobiology Database users -- escholarship.org/uc/item/9gg7...

Totally agree on all points. One thousand times this

Paleobiology is thriving at at the University of Oklahoma

So incredibly pround of my graduate student @crowleyk.bsky.social for graduating with a MSc degree today! She also submitted her first 1st author publication for peer review last week. Way to go Kiera!