Who doesn't love a good tautonym?!

It’s #TautonymTuesday! Meet 𝑅𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑛𝑐𝑎 𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑛𝑐𝑎, the bohor reedbuck. This medium-sized #antelope thrives in moist grasslands and savannas across sub-Saharan Africa. Known for its shy nature and whistling alarm calls. #TaxonomyTuesday #Systematics #Wildlife Photo: Bernard DUPONT

🎉🌍 Today is a wild day for #wildlife lovers! 🐾 It’s a wild day for wildlife! 🦧 Int’l Tamarin Day 🐘 #Elephant Appreciation Day 🦦 #SeaOtter Awareness Week 🦏 World #Rhino Day From trunks to tails, let’s celebrate these amazing #animals and support their #conservation! 🌿💚 #WildlifeDay

🦊Happy National Fox Day!🦊 Did you know? 🧠 Foxes show advanced problem-solving skills. 🌍 The red fox has the widest geographic range of any wild canid. 🧬 Island foxes evolved rapid dwarfism. Celebrate by sharing your favorite fox pics! #EvolutionaryBiology #BehavioralEcology #WildlifeScience

It’s #TautonymTuesday! Meet Cyanicterus cyanicterus, the blue-backed #tanager. This dazzling #bird from the Guianas is the only species in its genus, which makes it monotypic and a tautonym! #Ornithology #Taxonomy #Birds Photo: Hector Bottai

I'm starting a new series called #TautonymTuesday featuring a species where the binomial is the same name for the Genus and species! First up is #Lynx lynx, the Eurasian lynx! This elusive felid is the largest of the four lynx species, found across Europe and Asia. #Wildlife #CarnivoreEcology

It’s #TautonymTuesday! Meet Martes martes, the European pine marten. This agile #mustelid roams woodlands across Europe, known for its chestnut fur, bushy tail, and creamy throat patch. A classic tautonym in mammalian #taxonomy! #MartesMartes #CarnivoreEcology Photo: Dani Kropivnik

It’s #TautonymTuesday! Meet Calotes calotes, the vibrant Indian garden #lizard. Native to South Asia, this arboreal agamid is known for its striking coloration and dynamic displays. A classic example of a tautonym in reptilian taxonomy! #Herpetology #CalotesCalotes Photo: Rehman Abubakr #Reptiles

Super cool new armored dinosaur from 165mya has been further described! #Spicomellus afer had spiked ribs and huge spikes projecting out of hits hips. It also sported a tail club with spikes and blade-like #weapons down the lateral surfaces, along with a spiked collar! #armor

New paper out today lead by @tsengzj.bsky.social where we test the 150-year-old hypothesis that the unique jaw torus in Nimravus is an adaptation to resist bite forces using FEA🦁🔪our results highlight some functional advantage of the torus, which are amplified at larger gape doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

One of the best part of our annual meeting is getting to announce all of our society's annual awardees! This year, we inducted 5 new Fellows to our society. These fellows were all nominated by their peers for their distinguished contributions to the field. Congrats to all of them! 🎉🦆🐝🪹🐒🦜🎉

I'm starting a new series called #TautonymTuesday featuring a species where the binomial is the same name for the Genus and species! First up is #Lynx lynx, the Eurasian lynx! This elusive felid is the largest of the four lynx species, found across Europe and Asia. #Wildlife #CarnivoreEcology

Today we celebrate Lycaon pictus on World African Wild Dog Day! Known for its large rounded ears, long legs, and unique coat patterns, this social predator lives in packs and relies on cooperative hunting. Unlike other canids, it lacks dewclaws. #WildDogDay #Conservation Photo: Charles J. Sharp

Our #3Dprinted 1/4 scale #humpback whale skeleton is finally complete and hung up in our teaching classroom! My #mammalogy students printed the individual bones, and the #MarineMammalogy class painted and articulated the #skeleton with Dr. Jim Dines! It's about 11 feet long and looks amazing!

It seems that scientists got bored when they named some species -- The western lowlands gorilla: "Gorilla gorilla gorilla" Plains bison: "Bison bison bison" Northern European lynx: "Lynx lynx lynx" South African giraffe: "Giraffa giraffa giraffa" The roof rat: "Rattus rattus rattus"

We’ve got a curious new coworker at our Mukilteo terminal! This is Melvin, lovingly named by our Mukilteo terminal employees. He is an American Mink (Mustela vison) and has been spotted a few times in and around the employee stairwell and along the walkways.

Excited to be the lead feature on the CSU Long Beach home page right now, highlighting our mammal research activities and showcasing student research and our newest field project on small mammals! #CSULB #LongBeach www.csulb.edu/news/article...

This is an astounding act of pillage. Imagine this being your legacy: salting the earth that sprouted Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Car Talk, Sesame Street, This Old House, and Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me.

Happy #GuineaPigAppreciationDay! Guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus) are social, vocal #rodents descended from wild South American species. They’re herbivores with continuously growing teeth and a unique digestive system that includes coprophagy! #Rodentia #Caviidae #SciComm

Happy #WorldChimpanzeeDay! #Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) share ~98.8% of our DNA. They live in diverse African habitats, from rainforests to savannas, and show incredible #intelligence, empathy, and tool use. #Primates #GreatApes #Conservation

Because every #bluesky timeline needs this little cutie! 😊 #dog #dogday

You didn't need a video of a happy armadillo playing in a sprinkler, but here you go #bluesky ... ☺️

Happy #WorldMeerkatDay! New research shows meerkats don’t just forage randomly. Individuals hold consistent positions in the group. Dom females lead but gain less weight; older meerkats shift to the sides. Social roles matter! doi.org/10.1016/j.an... #MeerkatBehavior #AnimalEcology

Join us!!! 2 (!) PhD positions on wild chimpanzees and bonobos in the Ape Behaviour & Ecology Group and Wildminds Lab!!! 🤩🤩🤩

So cool! The oldest evidence of a predator-prey arms race—from the Cambrian! Fossils of Lapworthella fasciculata show prey thickening their shells over time in response to predator attacks. Microevolution in action, over 500 million years ago! #Paleontology #Evolution www.cell.com/current-biol...

Happy #WorldPorcupineDay! Porcupines are rodents with over 30 species across the Americas, Africa, and Asia. They’re herbivores, mostly nocturnal, and known for their iconic quills used for defense, not offense. #PorcupineDay #WildlifeScience

July is #NationalBisonMonth! The American #bison (Bison bison) is North America’s largest land mammal. While they once numbered in the tens of millions, they were driven to near extinction by the late 1800s. #BisonRecovery #WildlifeScience #ConservationHistory

The joys of being a professor! Copied straight from my anonymous student evaluations from my Spring course in Mammalogy. All of the other responses were like the green ones 😊. There's always at least one red one, though... Can't please everyone...

I've always been curious if this was the reason for the scaly-tails!! Scaly-tail organ enhances static stability during Pel’s scaly-tailed flying squirrels’ arboreal locomotion | Journal of The Royal Society Interface royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

I was asked by the Seal Beach Police Department to speak to the Seal Beach City Council last night about urban coyote behavior and conflict as they review their revised coyote management plan.

Happy #InternationalLynxDay! Lynx are medium-sized wild cats with four species: Eurasian, Canada, Iberian, and bobcat. Known for their tufted ears and stealth, they are solitary hunters adapted to forests and mountains. #WildCatConservation #Lynx #WildlifeScience

Day 2 of transect setup for our collaborative grazing project is done! Thanks to this great crew of awesome MS students for their hard work! We're interested in how different grazing treatments can reduce non native species and wildfire fuel!

Long, exhausting day yesterday setting up new small mammal trap transects for a project on grazing impacts on non-native vegetation and fire growth. Day 2 today!

Happy #NationalBlackBearDay! The American black bear (Ursus americanus) is the most widely distributed bear in North America, found from Alaska to Florida. Omnivorous and adaptable, they play a key role in forest ecosystems. #WildlifeScience #BlackBear #Mammalogy

Happy #WorldCaribouDay! Caribou (Rangifer tarandus) are Arctic-adapted ungulates that evolved ~2 million years ago. They migrate up to 5,000 km/year and are vital to tundra ecosystems as grazers and prey. #WildlifeScience #Caribou #Evolution #ArcticEcology

Happy World Sea Lion Day! Today we honor the seven species of sea lions, marine mammals known for their intelligence, agility, and social behavior. Found across the Pacific Ocean, sea lions play a vital role in marine ecosystems as both predators and prey. #WorldSeaLionDay #MarineMammals #SciComm

Congrats CSULB Class of 2025!

Happy Tree Kangaroo Day! Tree kangaroos are unique marsupials adapted to life in the treetops. Unlike their ground-dwelling cousins, tree kangaroos have strong forelimbs and long tails for balance, making them agile climbers in dense rainforest canopies. #TreeKangarooDay #WildlifeConservation

New lab t-shirts are in! 🥳🦨🦝🐯🦔🫎

In perhaps the nerdiest question I have ever written, I just added a bonus extra credit task to my San Diego Zoo field trip scavenger hunt: the first 2 students that email me photos of themselves next to exhibit signs of TWO mammals that are “tautonyms” will win a sticker and 5 extra credit points!

Final lab of the semester in mammalogy: Order Rodentia!

Honored to be awarded the 2025 @CSULB Distinguished Faculty Research, Scholarly, & Creative Achievement Award for my scientific research. I wasn't able to attend the ceremony last week, but I'm grateful for the recognition of my efforts & the hard work of my students and collabs.

The Department of Defense deemed a story about baseball hero and civil rights leader Jackie Robinson's time in the Army as "DEI" and deleted it.

A bite from a blue-lined octopus can kill a person. But for a female octopus, it's a temporary sedative that allows her mate to escape becoming her final meal. That story and more of the best from @science.org and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪

Looks like I'll be on sabbatical in Spring 2026! Woohoo!

Proud to be part of this massive collaboration (217 authors!) out today in Scientific Advances examining diel activity in mammals using camera data from all over the world! www.popsci.com/environment/...

David Northall captured this amazing photo of a honey badger getting quilled by an African porcupine - a finalist for Wildlife Photographer of the Year for best photo. Awesome - two of my favorite animals in the world. Honey badger don't care...

Look at this map. Look at it! This is what Amur Falcons do! Their migration is jaw-dropping. You do not want to miss Suresh Kumar's @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social webinar next week! birdsoftheworld.org/bow/news/amu...

Xin Bao and Yun Chuan look like they're wondering how the hell they got to San Diego from China. Or maybe it's just jetlag! @sandiegozoo.bsky.social

We are meeting with a lot of county agriculture commissioners right now as we prepare to launch a new study (in January) on reducing livestock🐂🐑🐐🦙depredation by cougars🐱 in California. I hope we can get lots of #LivestockOwners to participate!