Online Exhibit 🐊🐢 Rare, Beautiful & Fascinating Feature: Albury’s Tortoise and Cuban Crocodile These fossils were discovered by scuba diver Brian Kakuk about 60-70 feet deep in a blue hole in the Bahamas. 🎧 Story and more with David Steadman: www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/100-years/ob...

The lingering effects of my October flu vaccine, squaring up against a massive Flu B outbreak at my kids' school:

I did not need to be attacked like this first thing in the morning.

Looks like my talk for the Royal Tyrrell Museum was also posted today. This one is about our ongoing research on dinosaur mummies. 🧪 youtu.be/FM5ei-1znaQ?...

Because I am still a croc paleontologist (not just a dinosaur paleontologist, despite rumors to the contrary), I'm talking about crocodyliform bite marks and diet at the Tellus Museum today.

And then, they made me their queen... Well, no, but the mayor of Drumheller did stop by my talk to give me several pins, so that was unexpected, a little surreal, and also fantastic.

Now this is a movie plot!!! Someone understands grad school.

This #paleoart shows 3 views of the Devonian brachiopod fossil Paraspirifer bownockeri; one is reconstructed w/ some epifauna and boreholes. These are fun to find; they're an impressive size (for brachiopods). I had an excellent specimen to use as a reference for this painting. #FossilFriday #sciart

I would love to see something similar done with paleoart too.

Drive by Brachiosaurus-ing as I run my butt off between connecting gates in O'Hare:

I want to spend more time writing about the amazing fossil discoveries paleontologists are unveiling each week. So I've started a newsletter! You can subscribe, and read the first post, right here. Welcome to The Boneyard. 🦴

Please enjoy our research paper on how Bluesky is the preferred home of academics of all stripes, including professors of rare moths. (Yes, we actually have lots of entomologists here). academic.oup.com/icb/article-... 🧪

I've apparently got two first-authored fish papers in press now, so in honor of my new status as a fish paleontologist, here it the RTM's fish-within-a-fish fossil:

The Royal Tyrrell Museum's galleries are like a Who's Who of famous death posture dinos:

We sent out our Nile Crocodile mount for restoration. It’ll be included in a new upcoming exhibit and needed freshening up!

Borealopelta really is just obscenely beautiful. Just a jaw-dropping fossil.

Dinosaur swim tracks. These scratches were made by the clawed feet of dinosaurs similar to the little carnivore Coelophysis, around 200 million years ago, as the reptiles paddled in a lake’s shallows. Most dinosaur swim tracks described so far were made by carnivores. 🧪

There’s more to know, but you can get caught up with this paper by @uglyfossils.bsky.social @boydpaleo.bsky.social et al.

Paleontologists used to think that dino skin impressions required rapid burial, soon after death, to be preserved. But now we know there’s not a single pathway to exceptional preservation, and desiccation often plays a role. Look at this chunk of hadrosaur tail, so dried the skin shrunk to bone. 🧪

I have to admit, the name is making this kind of hilarious for me too.

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

“Please keep your hands away from the bitey end”

A 95 million year old angiosperm leaf preserved as an impression in an iron-cemented sandstone. The original leaf may have gone, but you can still see where invertebrates nibbled it. From Dakota Formation, Kansas. Cenomanian, probably. #FossilFriday ⚒🌏🔬🌱🍃🌳

Maybe a bit late for web timing, but ehy, NEW PAPER ON #fossilfriday!!! I am proud to present you Haolong dongi gen. nov. sp. nov., a new hadrosauroid from the Early Cretaceous of China! The specimen, almost complete, is a juvenile iguanodontian from the Yixian Formation of the Barremian (125 Mya).

I've been singing this to myself all day

I'll be scratching a travel/research destination off of my bucket list next week:

More on DinoTracker, our new free app for classifying and identifying dinosaur footprints! The app I wish I had as a grad student... From our pals @iflscience.com www.iflscience.com/did-ai-just-...

Opportunity for women students in paleontology! The Winifred Goldring Award will be presented to three women graduate students and the AWG Undergraduate Paleontology Award will be presented to a student pursuing a career in paleontology. Due April 30th. More information here: tinyurl.com/msdc3m68

Attending a responsible conduct of research workshop for NSF compliance today, and whew, some of the areas covered on the agenda have become awkwardly topical given some of the conversations surrounding community ethics in ScienceSky this week.

Let‘s open this question up: who are the kindest, most wholesome paleontologists you know (Current/retired/historical/whatever)? Who SHOULD be featured in documentaries? I’m tired of doomering, let’s focus on the bright lights among us.

Because I am apparently a deeply unserious person, my main reaction to Chappell Roan's very uncomfy looking Grammys outfit was, "Wait, is her back tattoo the JSTOR logo?!" It was not.

Doom scrolling through the posts about academics who have popped up in the Epstein list, cozying up for research funding and worse. The ethical bar we're asking people to clear is so low, it's literally in hell.

Squidfalls! Yeah old news but new to me 🦑

First pub of the new year, with @drjmchugh.bsky.social We're back on our bone surface modification nonsense, this time comparing bite marks and insect traces between two Jurassic sites and between our work on those sites and other teams' to see how comparable they all are.

When everyone else is out buying last second groceries ahead of the ice storm, but your kid tells you he's got a school assignment to make a Medusa head by next week.

Happy #FossilFriday. Did you know Diplodocus skin glows orange under UV light? 🦕🟠

Send thoughts and prayers. I am manually cut and pasting 1,774 character descriptions one at a time into a character taxon matrix to meet journal submission requirements today.

This year's @geosociety.bsky.social annual meeting had a theme session titled 'Coprolite Happens,' & in my talk I showed a slide of this coprolite-in-a-coprolite, then followed it with a 'Knives Out' gif of Daniel Craig/Benoit Blanc with a similarly expressed revelation on donut holes.

It's nice to be really seen this gift giving season:

I got to chat with Robert Sansom about the reptile decomposition research when I was at #2025SVP this last month. Here's the full podcast of The Fossil Files from the meeting, which includes my bit: fossils.libsyn.com/rotting-croc...

Mosasaurs, the giant marine reptiles that roamed the Earth more than 66 million years ago, didn’t just live in the sea. Our new research shows that they could thrive in freshwater too! Let’s dive into what we’ve discovered. #Paleontology #Mosasaurs

a sebecid and a dyrosaurid squabble over a delicious turtle #paleoart

Science Christmas The Upturned Microscope

Does having my research made into weird AI slop where "I" am portrayed by an uncanny valley Jane Goodall (and her clone, and also 3 cloned grad students) mean I have "arrived" as a scientist?

The jumble of bones looked like porridge. It turned out to be a new species of pterosaur preserved in prehistoric vomit, the latest fossil find extracted from dinosaur excretions. I’ll tell you more in my latest for NatGeo. 🧪

Do better. (There, I just put more effort into writing the above response than anyone involved with the "writing," "reviewing," or "editing" of this "paper.")

For this week's #FossilFriday, here's a specimen which brought tears to my eyes — the original Megalosaurus dentary, first dinosaur fossil ever scientifically described, way back in 1824

Introduce yourself with 5 animals you've seen in the wild: American Alligator American Crocodile Spectacled Caiman West African Crocodile And then, because I broke my 🐊 streak: Killer Whale