A deep-sea whale necropolis that has: 1) Far more whale falls than you can imagine, 2) At wild depths, & 2) Whale fossils as old as the Mio/Plio boundary, still on the seafloor?? 🤯 Gets my vote most interesting publication of 2026 (so far). #AcademicSky 🧪⚒️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For those of you who had the Frontiers family of journals as the first quasi-reputable* journals to be utter enshittified by AI editorial systems, you're today's lucky winner. Thread. *this has been debatable since their inception, but they somehow have always attracted good authors.

A Swamp White Oak, standing alone in a city park as a wolf tree, bridging the divide between two periods when the people living in this place are stewards of this land

Whitetail Deer buck and doe finally in their sleek tan summer coats, in a Maple-Ironwood woodland

Ok let's get real spicy. With enough fossil data, many *species* will be cladistically paraphyletic around their daughter species.

Being a paleontologist means spending 4 days diving down a taxonomic citation rabbit hole only to realize, at the end, that nobody has officially established what a zebra is/is not, despite like ten papers very nearly doing so

Climate action works. Slowly, but it works.

Nearly every fossil genus is going to be paraphyletic around every daughter genus once we have a complete enough fossil record. Once we accept that that's ok, we can finally move on (Looking at you, Australopithecus, Eotragus, and Kolpochoerus)

I see this American Red Squirrel every day on my walk to work. Everybody meet Leonardo #MammalMonday

Three years ago tomorrow, I very nervously gave this speech. I knew my career as a TV journalist was dunzo, cooked, filleted, kaput the morning I wrote it. (Thanks to Kat insisting I go for it anyway.) The end is awfully prescient at this exact second, though. Big ups to Scott Pelley for fighting.

Chana masala with jeera rice

Fiddleheads, wild mushrooms, and duck sausage

We currently have at least two newborn Whitetail fawns on campus

Zebra premolars and molars from an African Humid Period (~10,000 yr old) site in Turkana, Kenya, for #FossilFriday

Stream through the Northern Hardwoods

We are excited by these results, because it means we can probably do genetic studies of ancient animal populations in RSA, so long as they lived during the Holocene. And second, because this means we can do palaeogenetic studies of extinct like the giant long-horned buffalo! 🐃 So watch this space 👀

In our paper, we screened 144 antelope & buffalo teeth & bones from #SouthAfrica spanning the last 100,000 years. The oldest DNA we retrieved was between 21,000 and 50,000 years old! 👀 This is the oldest for sub-Saharan #Africa & we're busy confirming the age of these fossils.

The oldest DNA retrieved from an animal fossil is ~1.6 million years old - a mammoth from icy Siberia where cold temperatures preserve DNA well. But have you ever wondered how long #ancientDNA is preserved in animal remains from sunny & warm Africa? Well, wonder now more! doi.org/10.1016/j.qu...

Three and a half centuries after the Pueblo Revolt, a Pueblo will be the Governor of New Mexico

Sushi time

Pacific Elk in a coastal Oregon meadow for #MammalMonday

Balcony garden is coming together!

Bigfruit Hawthorns thriving

Ostrich Ferns in a clearing

I didn't realize ecology was supposed to be tied to shareholder value

Neanderthal skeleton in our display case for #FossilFriday

Slime molds (Wolf's Milk) on a fallen log

This horrifying proposal would break American science in a way I don't think many people realize www.science.org/content/arti...

This is a crazy one! Behold: the incredible journey of the eastern newt! #wildlife #animal #animals #critter #biology #science #stem #newt #salamander #amphibians #nature

Female Bird Day was this past weekend but I missed it femalebirdday.wordpress.com I do have a print of female birds that's sure to educate and baffle topatoco.com/products/rom...

Men will literally believe in Evolutionary Psychology instead of going to therapy

Our paper on turtle origins is finally out in Current Biology, with two major implications for our understanding of reptile evolution 🐢 #Paleontology #Turtles #Evolution www.cell.com/current-biol...

My leader this week: an anti-capitalist screed in New Scientist! www.newscientist.com/article/mg27...

The Squamish people of what is now Vancouver were illegally dispossessed of their land 100 years ago. They sued, got the land back, and used their sovereignty to ignore local zoning and build 6,000 new homes over the loud objections of nearby wealthy NIMBYs. Now other tribes are getting in the game.

Happy to share our new article "Evaluation of DNA and collagen preservation in Late Pleistocene and Holocene bovid fossils from South Africa" for a project led by @ddj-sa.bsky.social! Notably, we extracted ancient DNA from fossil Syncerus antiquus (Giant Long-Horned Buffalo)! Article linked below

Misanthropy will not solve the Climate Crisis.

Nettle Goldenrod tea for allergies

Squishy

A friend of mine who was TA’ing for an AmLit course found a copy of Moby Dick a student had left behind. It had only one marginal annotation, around page 100, that simply said “whale is important.”

Another sunset restoration day at Superior Street. Common yellowthroats and yellow star grass and golden dodder all added to the golden hour tinge imbuing this remnant savanna and prairie with warm magic. And look at the cutie patootie hiding from my old iPhone X in the second pic

Douglas Squirrel on a Bigleaf Maple in Oregon for #MammalMonday

Adapis parisiensis

Brown butter Bull Thistle and potatoes

Beech-Hemlock Forest and an Eastern Red-Backed Salamander hiding under an Oak stump

Here's the Bluebird house building crew yesterday - we're attracting bluebirds to balance out the bugs that have been eating the black currants. Four chicks hatched so far this year #organic #gay #farmers #ecologicalrestoration

Yellow and Black millipede on a Larch

Maple-Alder forest in Oregon

This headline is hilarious when you learn that the rocket toppled over in a fiery explosion on landing

Monocots. 🌴 Geophytes. 🪻 Mediterranean biome. 🔥 Phylogenetic diversity. 🤓 Check. It. Out. 🥳 (This project took 5+ years for various reasons. Science takes time sometimes and that’s ok!) dx.doi.org/10.1111/geb....

Going a different direction for a belated #FossilFriday: Dawn Redwood at @uoregon.bsky.social campus