She sees dead things. @uglyfossils.bsky.social totally killed it with her talk at #2025SVP today on the decomposition of reptiles and implications for Dinosaur Mummy formation. If you missed it, be sure to find her today... as it is the last day of the conference.

I survived my #2025SVP talk (and so did the audience). I hope my decomposing reptiles didn't put anyone off their lunch.

Just one week until Birmingham welcomes #SVP2025 #2025SVP: first field trip leaves next Sunday!

Doing my final packing for #SVP2025, and luckily, we're not actually required to wear 15 pieces of flare.

To all my colleagues who are traveling to Birmingham from the US to attend #SVP2025 next week:

Dear colleagues, I know we all have #SVP2025 next week, but could you maybe not inundate me with peer review requests right now? Because I am also trying to get paper revisions sent back so I don't have to think about them while attending the conference. Sincerely, A Hypocrite

For Halloween, I dressed up as the scariest thing I could imagine. No, not the skeleton.

“The sort of basic [fossilization] question of ‘How did this thing fossilize in the first place?’ hasn’t received as much attention in the past. I think this was a really great deep dive into this one area where we do see several specimens." @uglyfossils.bsky.social

Mesquite 4.02 update released! It fixes a few bugs and adds Codon Alignment and various other improvements. Also, much faster with genomics files with 1000s of loci. www.mesquiteproject.org 🧪 #evolbio @bembidion.bsky.social

On @cnn.com Science, @uglyfossils.bsky.social & Yours Truly were quoted with our takes on newly interpreted clay "death mask" interpretation for preservation of Late Cretaceous dinosaur "mummies," reported in the news elsewhere yesterday. www.cnn.com/2025/10/23/s... 🧪🦖🦕🪨

New paper today in @science.org: we date the Naashoibito Member (New Mexico) to 66.4–66.0 Ma, coeval with the Hell Creek, with important remarks on pre-extinction dinosaur diversity & regionalisation in North America 🦖🦕☄1/ Art: @nataliajagielska.bsky.social 🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

How to Make a 'Dinosaur Mummy' (If You Have Millions of Years, Some Microbes, and a Whole Lot of Clay) 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/duck...

You didn’t think you were just getting one dinosaur article from me today, did you? In another for NatGeo, I dig into how dinosaur “mummies” are preserved - and why there are probably many more exceptional dinosaur fossils out there than we ever dreamed. 🧪

Duck-billed dinosaur fleshy midline and hooves reveal terrestrial clay-template “mummification” | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Wyoming's famed dinosaur "mummy zone" has yielded two more remarkable Edmontosaurus mummies! In a new paper, scientists describe the microbe-led process that delicately preserved these dinosaurs' scaly hides and hooves in clay. Latest for @nytimes.com: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/s...

Decades of Drought Are Changing How Paleontologists Search for Fossils As the planet gets hotter, relics of history are receding from view by Riley Black (restingdinoface.bsky.social) www.sierraclub.org/sierra/decad...

At the empty USGS booth at GSA. More out of view on both sides

New paper on crocodylian locomotor evolution led by Masaya Iijima, w/Richard Blob & me! More erect hindlimb postures help extant gators support their weight (esp. at ankle), & how these mechanics constrained giant Deinosuchus to a slow walk at best! The paper-- www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The secret to making happy little Edmontosaurus mummy murder mittens is lots of duct tape and really loud Ladytron while waiting for adhesive to cure. My methods certainly do get results i guess.

I'm not at #GSA2025, but some of my bask of little crocodiles went. Here's undergraduate researcher Owen Singleton, presenting our research on reptile decomposition. I am sad to say that GSA does not support smell-o-vision technology, but I suspect the presentation was plenty gross without it.

Looking for a very specific photo of the Ornithischian Hall at AMNH. I want to see the mummified Lambeosaurus from far enough away that you can see the shape and dimensions of the case it's in. Like the 1st image, but further back. Or the 2nd image, but slightly to the left. Can anyone help?

No big deal. It's not like I have an online exam scheduled for this week... Oh wait.

For #FossilFriday, an ichnological 2-for-1 special in a body fossil: a termite nest packed with termite coprolites (feces) in an araucarian tree trunk, from the Early Cretaceous (~125 mya) of Victoria, Australia; oldest termite nest in Australia & largest wood nest from this time. 🧪🪵🪨⚒️ #ichnology

I love fossils. And I love horror. Tyrant Lizard Queen is going to have heaps of both.

This #FossilFriday, we have our museum's most recognizable fossil: Fish-Within-A-Fish! Featuring Xiphactinus, a large predatory fish, with the smaller Gillicus in its gut contents. It was found and collected by George F. Sternberg in 1952, and is now an iconic part of the Sternberg's collections!

I finally put a human in for scale of the Deinosuchus

There's something slightly creepy about going through the hours of silent trailcam footage at our decomp experiment. Most of them don't end up recording anything (which makes you wonder what tripped the motion sensor in the first place), and then every once in a while, you get jump scared by a deer.

Happy Croctober everyone! We just finished the prototype Deinosuchus schwimmeri, named in honor of David Schwimmer (not not THAT one) Holy crap this croc is BIG!

Jane Goodall, a towering figure in primatology whose observations of chimpanzee behavior in the wild and advocacy for their conservation made her a household name, died Wednesday at the age of 91. https://scim.ag/4mKKEg4

A happy day 2 of #Croctober (lets see how long I can keep this going) Crocs are well known for their parenting, but did you know that we even have fossils of them on their nest? This specimen comes from Germany and clearly shows a Diplocynodon mother that died on her nest

Happy #Croctober to all who celebrate.

I was sick all week, which has kind of derailed a lot of stuff. To play catch up, here I am in my office, chatting research with @boydpaleo.bsky.social and @mhouseholder.bsky.social while sewing patches on my eldest kid's gi ahead of his karate belt test tonight. #sciencemom

Now that I have received confirmation that my #SVP2025 abstract about reptile decomposition has been accepted as a talk, I went ahead and downloaded the most important graphic of my upcoming presentation:

Bite marks on a section of the neural spine of a dorsal vertebra from the #IsleofWight iguanodontian dinosaur Brighstoneus simmondsi. Trace fossils transporting you back to a short space of time 125 million years ago. #FossilFriday

Clustering crocodylian dental morphology: Insights into functional adaptations, diet, and ontogeny - Testin - Journal of Anatomy - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The wolf wall at La Brea displays the skulls of 400 dire wolves, a fraction of the number in the museum’s collection. Current research includes looking into wolves from the “tough times” pits, when Aenocyon wore down and broke more teeth by chewing bones more often. 🧪

Elucidating the thermometabolism of Thalattosuchus superciliosus (de Blainville) Young, Brignon, Sachs, Hornung, Foffa, Kitson, Johnson & Steel, 2021 (Archosauria: Metriorhynchidae): a paleohistological study. Comptes Rendus Palevol 24 (17): 333-344. doi.org/10.5852/cr-p...

A clerid beetle, visiting our crocodylian decomposition research site:

Shark Week bills itself as pro science and conservation and says they don’t promote fear. One of these 2025 episode titles is real and I made up the rest. Guess which is real. 1 Great white assassins 2 Great white sex battle 3 Great white invasion 4 Florida’s death beach Lolz all real

A colleague took a somewhat tasteful photo of my students (Hannah Maddox and Owen Singleton) and I looking over our current decomposition experiment. I'm looking forward to sharing the research, but I recognize that the photos are a bit grim for general consumption.

#livefromthefield Work resumes on "Scorpio" the Lambeosaurus lambei whose quarry was reopened last year. While last year we collected the skull, this year the body blocks are revealing vast swaths of skin underneath! Exciting!

🚨 New paper published! We report multiple cases of osteomyelitis (bone infection) in sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Cretaceous of Brazil. The fossils show different patterns of reactive bone growth, but no healing — the infections were active when they died. 🧪⚒️ 👉 doi.org/10.1002/ar.7...

Don’t forget that the abstract deadline for #2025SVP #SVP2025 is tomorrow! vertpaleo.org/abstract-sub...

After much waffling about whether I was going to attend, I've just submitted an abstract for SVP 2025 on the dinomummy team's ongoing nonsense. I guess that means I'm committed.

Pit wear, but not the kind deodorant leaves on your old tees. Bones inside ancient asphalt seeps rub against each other over time, thanks to the gloppy nature of the tar. Isolated and jumbled bones score each other, creating what looks like bite marks but is actually damage left long after death. 🧪

Not me making myself cry watching baby caiman hatch. They're just sweet little babies 😭

It was a monumental effort to try to quantify employment trends in US paleo. Please give it a read and see how your academic society can help address these issues. Huge thanks to @fossilexpress.bsky.social @fossilsndcoffee.bsky.social @jkimmig.bsky.social Sandy Carlson and Elizabeth Petsios

Fossil trackway evidence for amniotes ("reptiles") MUCH earlier than previously supported by the fossil record, in Early Carboniferous rocks (358-347 mya) of Victoria, Australia. Big congrats to John Long et al. on this important discovery! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🐾🦎🪨⚒️

Great information, but I do wish we had more data on the biology side of things. Vert paleo has always leaned that way, and a huge number of my cohort has landed in gross anatomy positions in medical schools.

Evidence of fish-eating in the enantiornithean ("opposite bird") Cratoavis: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🪶🧪 (📷Salgado et al.)