Pretty purple blewit as an appetizer today!

IT’s HERE! The trailer from Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age! I cannot wait for you to watch it! Once again, I’m so proud to be part of the amazing and talented group of people who help put this series together! #PrehistoricPlanet youtu.be/f7kvwp9aIyM?...

Folks, saying ABOLISH ICE isn't hard. Quite easy. The water is warm here. Jump in. Mainstream it. People will follow.

When I imagined the future, I was excited for flying cars and a cure for cancer. I wasn't expecting daily emails from my washing machine.

White pines after sunset, illuminated by the moon (and a good non-apple phone camera)

Grateful to spend two days on the Klamath watching chinook, liberated by dam removal, return to streams from which they’d been precluded since the Titanic sank. Fish are everywhere, in numbers that stagger the mind & locations that biologists figured would take years to repopulate. Too beautiful.

The world's oldest bacterial DNA found in a million-year-old mammoth! New results from researchers at #CpgSthlm published in Cell! Paper: www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

Amazing paper by some of my friends and collaborators at Koobi Fora! Early Oldowan technology thrived during Pliocene environmental change in the Turkana Basin, Kenya www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Buster likes his possum pillow

Ignoring for a second that geoengineering is one of the stupidest ideas, why would this have anything to do with AI? WHY?!?! You want to use satellites to control how much sun reaches earth? Okay. That’s just an engineering project. No need for any AI, at all. But grifters slap it on everything now.

Your daily dose of climate hope. From the team at RMI: rmi.org/wp-content/u...

Little dudes hanging out, gathering red acorns #MammalMonday

We're currently at the "Jesus didn't say we should feed people" portion of the fall of American Evangelicalism.

Despite its widespread use in paleoanthropology, PCA is ill-suited and unreliable for inferring hominin evolutionary relationships from morphological data. Studies of hominin systematics that rely on PCA as a means of inferring morphological and phylogenetic affinity should be revisited. end/

Much of what we know about hominin diversity comes from studies which make phylogenetic claims from PCA. Here, we simulated datasets analogous to the hominin fossil record and found that PCA vastly underperformed, recovering topology in 0-2.4% of simulated datasets. 2/

Happy to share a new preprint, the first from my PhD research with Professor John Huelsenbeck at UC Berkeley! Here, we test whether PCA can recover hominin phylogeny from both geometric morphometric data and traditional measurements. 1/ 🧪 #PaleoSky #phylogenetics

Some backyard foraging to start off the day: Shaggy Mane

Nanotyrannus is real. For years I’ve considered many mid-sized gracile tyrannosaurs to be juvenile T. rex. But I was wrong. This stunning new skeleton of a mature long-armed small tyrannosaur is clearly a different species. Isn’t science fun?! www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Indigenous-led restoration is not only the best, but the ONLY way to restore ecosystems

Watch out for Ea Nasir this Halloween!

Two Hartebeest molars in a maxilla, from the Last Interglacial of Turkana, Kenya--a time period in which we desperately need more research! #FossilFriday

Very happy to admit I've been wrong about this all along--nice to finally meet you, Nanotyrannus

She's a politician, running for Congress in Illinois. She attended a protest against ICE. ICE brutalized her, tear gassed her, body slammed her to the ground. And now *she's* been arrested for 'hindering' ICE. She faces eight years in prison. This is fascism.

We can find suitable land with sunlight, water, and nutrients to grow plants, wait years to harvest the biomass and burn it for energy, hope to capture the CO₂ with carbon capture and storage technology, and find a suitable spot to bury the CO₂ permanently. OR we can use solar panels.

We now have studies from Kenya, Ethiopia, and Malawi all suggesting the same thing: that African savanna mammals migrated *very little* before the Holocene!

"We found no evidence of migratory behavior in species that exhibit this behavior today. Ancient foragers likely hunted prey that were available year-round, consistent with zooarchaeological and genetic evidence for reduced mobility at the end of the Pleistocene." 🏺🧪🦣

Cozy season: chicken stew with garden carrots and foraged honey mushrooms

A new study shows the impact of Neanderthals and later hunter-gatherer peoples on nature turns out to have had a far greater influence on shaping the landscape of what we now know as Europe. www.bajr.org/neanderthals...

Some perfect plump porcini buttons #kingbolete #boletusedulis

I only count birds I photograph on my life list, and I checked off my first blackpoll warbler the other day. Here it is looking up from foraging methodically through the Spanish moss in a live oak. In the fall they lose a lot of their contrast, picking up this brown and pale yellow coloring. #birds

Homemade whole wheat bread with sautéed Slippery Jack Mushrooms and foraged herbs, everything collected in the woods behind my apartment

Fresh and prepared Slippery Jacks--they taste like buttery, nutty dark-meat chicken

cannot believe on some level I & my colleagues have turned the tide on this, but also it was in some senses inevitable as why not! Humans can do anything; we still have a way to go however of course, but: banning AI in the classroom should be as uncontroversial as banning calculators in early maths

happy #fossilfriday! this is panderodus, a jawless fish that lived between the middle ordovician and the late devonian. the species p. unicostatus was one of the few vertebrates of the silurian period to hunt large prey (art by mightyfossils)

They aren't going to cancel the 2025-2028 elections outright--but they are going to do everything in their power to make sure only one type of person can vote.

Check out those nice paleosols! :) All the colorful stripes are ancient soils. They make badlands look no-so-bad. Fossil sites need time to refresh, which just means time for erosion to do it's thing. It's not like the opening of Jurassic Park. Mother nature provides, we just pick up the bits. 🪨🧪

happy #fossilfriday! bonus: this is udanoceratops, a ceratopsian from late cretaceous mongolia. although herbivorous, its huge beak was likely powerful enough to cut bone, and a scar on the holotype’s mandible may be evidence of this (art by hank sharpe)

Late-surviving New Mexican dinosaurs illuminate high end-Cretaceous diversity and provinciality | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Kings don't build palaces that they intend to leave in three years. I'm waiting for a single major news source to call the East Wing ballroom construction what it is: another step toward absolute monarchy

Biggest takeaway from this study: Dinosaurs were doing fine right up until the impact! #FossilFriday

Excited to share the results of collaborative research in the San Juan Basin in New Mexico published today in @science.org that provides new age constraints for the Naashobito dinosaurs from New Mexico, like the giant sauropod, Alamosaurus: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The oceans and land mop up about half of the carbon that humans emit. Until they don't. My new piece on the weakening of natural carbon sinks, and the fallacy that we humans have our hands on a global thermostat, is out now for @carnegieendowment.org carnegieendowment.org/emissary/202...

The skull numbered KNM-WT 40000 was first found by Justus Erus in 1999 and is between 3.57 and 3.4 million years old. While broken and distorted, some aspects of its face are different from other contemporary species, leading Meave Leakey and coworkers to name it Kenyanthropus platyops. #inktober

The same people who lost their minds over renovations to Cracker Barrel are totally fine with the White House getting bulldozed

Ezra Klein defends liberal transphobia by saying that public opinion is very mildly transphobic on youth sports. But, public opinion did not support interracial marriage until the late 90s. The public was wrong. Carving out a trans exception for human rights denatures human rights as an idea.

270. More than 270 www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/...

The fossils of a potential ancestor, Orrorin tugenensis, were found #OnThisDay in 2000 in Kenya. The bones give us hints about early experiments in walking upright. 🏺

It wasn't anti-white to support boycotting South African teams under apartheid. It's not Russophobia to support boycotting Russian teams after the invasion of Ukraine. And it's not antisemitism to support boycotting Israeli teams after a genocide.

Hands-down, I have the prettiest walk to work