Some exciting scenes in North Essex today - a raven mobbing a buzzard! I've never seen a raven in this part of the country before, and it looks like it's here to stay because it returned to its nest (and mate) in the top of a tall pine tree. #birdsofbluesky (photos @samuraipizzakat.bsky.social)

For most of my life I never imagined I'd see this sight in southern England 🦫

So far, Just 18,557 of the 69.86 million people in the UK have donated to help save the Rothbury Estate in #Northumberland. If £13.5 million can be raised by September, this will become the largest new nature reserve in the UK in a generation. Please donate! www.wildlifetrusts.org/appeals/roth...

I love this! The brilliant Holly Dunsworth is reviewing Sapiens, one page at a time, separating myth from fact… Let’s dive in! ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/03/sapi...

New #Postdoc alert! This is a really cool project, working with a great team including the wonderful @drphilcox.bsky.social and @toriherridge.bsky.social. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us

Vous voulez faire une thèse sur l'évolution de la tête des squamates au Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle? C'est par ici: adum.fr/as/ed/voirpr... Interested in a PhD on the evolution of the head shape of squamates at the Museum of Natural History of Paris? Here you go: adum.fr/as/ed/voirpr...

Absolutely not. If you are using AI to write you should 100% be ashamed. Shame is one of the last bulwarks against a total slop apocalypse. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/b...

Controversial(?) opinion, but dogs should not be let off their leads in the countryside at all. www.derbyshire.police.uk/news/derbysh...

My full quote to the Times on why it’s bananas to let landowners release 50m pheasants into the British countryside without proper regulations, given their ecological impacts and role as a vector for bird flu:

VICTORY! Government to open up the Land Registry - bringing to an end a thousand years of secrecy shrouding who owns England. I’ve been campaigning for this for ten years: the new Land Use Framework, published later today, makes it government policy. 1/ www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Otto Warburg's grant application: "I need 10,000 marks".

"The results are astonishingly clear. On rewilded land, biodiversity surged across the board, with the number of bird species up 261%. The variety of bumblebee and butterfly species more than doubled, their abundance increased over 10x." The cure for nature loss exists. share.google/w30RUdw1902W...

In the last two weeks, 1% of new NSF awards were in biology. Just one grant of 97. One. Biology in the US is on hold until there’s a regime change.

I’m looking for a post doc (up to five years) interested in phylogenetics and earth systems - please spread the word!

This #FossilFriday I've got a treat for the bird palaeontologists out there. Here are some specimens that we scanned for our recent paper on bird skull/brain skull evolution. All but one are extinct birds from the collections of the @nhm-london.bsky.social www.morphosource.org/media-lists/...

This is not my fess, but it might as well be

Hey fellow scientists, I'm just letting you know that if you're promoting something with some junky AI image, I'm not gonna click. You've got a workshop, a conference, a new paper? Just not gonna bother. You want a bespoke image? Hire an illustrator.

This is excellent news! One to look out for in the coming months. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

There are clearly very severe penalties for rule breaking round here!

Next time someone asks you to sum up MAGA in 30 seconds or less, show them this clip of Andrew Tate explaining why he doesn't read books.

THREAD. 3 & 1/4 years ago, with no warning, a brilliant orange farm cat wandered over from the draughty barn where he'd been living, in rural Cornwall, & decided he wanted to live with us instead. We decided to call him Jim. This is the first photo I took of him, on that night: December 1st 2022

New paper out from @hoehna.bsky.social Lab, led by the brilliant @bjorntko.bsky.social! We applied the Pesto software (Kopperud & Höhna, 2025) to look at lineage-specific shifts in diversification rate on large, densely-sampled phylogenies across the Tree of Life doi.org/10.1093/evle...

If you see a snail crossing a path & grab its shell to move it out of the way, you might be injuring it while thinking you're helping but grabbing the shell is a problem ✅ How to move a snail safely: #GardenWildlife #GentleGardening ee

Exhausted - and in some cases dead - Atlantic puffins have been washing up around the UK recently after storms have left them weak and unable to feed. If you find a puffin: ✍️Log your sighting on iNaturalist: buff.ly/sMJmnVF 🚑If it’s alive, contact a local veterinary practice who can advise you

A reminder: today is the only day of the year when you can legally buy the ingredients for #pancakes

SVP Diversity Committee co-chair here. Feel free to dm me your thoughts. I’m working with DivComm and some other committees on an action plan and I’d love to know what you want to happen and what would make you feel safer, reassured, and welcome.

Speaking as someone who was involved in the sexual selection argument referred to here, along with @tetzoo.bsky.social and @davehone.bsky.social, I reckon Horner got thoroughly and convincingly panned. One of my main takeaways was how little actual biology some of these senior palaeo guys know... 🧪

This might be a good opportunity to link to my first ever publication, in which we test Padian and Horner's 'species recognition' hypothesis (something they never bothered doing) in ceratopsians and found no evidence for it. royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

The new computational model for jaw mechanics in piranhas is called PiranhaLever, available for download on my GitHub github.com/mwestneat/Pi.... Along with various other models for biomechanics and morphometrics. All Mac apps, install the dmg and skirt your security demon 😎

Oh

“Shawn the Prawn” is a fossilised prawn in the marble floor of Australia’s Parliament House.

I found this fossil vertebra on the floor of a hotel spa in Egypt! #urbangeology

Study on the diversification of jaw shape in pelagiarian/scombriform fishes led by @knapprew.bsky.social out in Evolution Letters as Editor's Choice. Gorgeous trichiuroid render by co-author @sternarchella.bsky.social nabbed the cover! Open access: academic.oup.com/evlett/artic...

Delighted that our article on pelagiarian mandible evolution has made the cover of @evolletters.bsky.social!

The egrets are off to bed! Another perfect evening on the #Egyptian Red Sea coast.

Just saw a post with George Clinton citing the Beatles as his favorite band, which reminded me of this quote he once gave me

Lunchtime #bittern at London Wetland Centre and a better shot of a cousin. @wwtworldwide.bsky.social @everyheron.bsky.social

As it's #FossilFriday, why not share this wonderful artwork of objectively the best group of #dinosaurs?

This shot of a heron passing across the aptly named Heron Pond in Bushy Park is one of my favourites from a magical early morning shoot last week. I love the silhouette effect and the mystical atmosphere created by the morning mist and reflections in the water.❤️ @theroyalparks.bsky.social

🔥🇪🇺 “Europeans enjoy more free time than Americans, a higher life expectancy and lower levels of inequality – all with roughly comparable productivity. Whichever way you look at it, this is a significantly superior economic performance.”

🔍Home PhD opportunity with funding to start in October 2026: "Integrating environmental DNA into national biodiversity datasets to explain drivers of biodiversity loss" 🧬📊🐛🌳🪿supervised by me, Charlie Outhwaite (ZSL) and Eleni Matechou (School of Mathematical Sciences, QMUL).

All Reform councils to raise taxes despite campaign pledges Who would have guessed www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

This tweet was deleted while he was in the press conference announcing he was defecting!

The Cardiff Lions do an annual Drag Rugby charity match for children’s charities and it’s as beautiful as you imagined