1🧵 Excited to share my first PhD paper, published in @dev-journal.bsky.social What if fish gills —often overlook —hold secrets about development, patterning, and function? We uncovered how early patterning shapes adult gill architecture. journals.biologists.com/dev/article/... #DevBio #Zebrafish

🐺 Happy to share our recent article, “The dire wolf resurrection that wasn’t” anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... Thanks to my awesome co-authors Annie Burrows, Adam Hartstone-Rose, and Mike Jensen-Seaman!

I am one of a growing number of voices encouraging the scientific community to engage with people and policymakers outside of our typical professional circles. Our professional organizations, including @sicb.bsky.social, also need to engage with new audiences by making their science accessible.

Here, the 'ballistic tongues' paper by Yu Zeng and team www.cell.com/current-biol... plus dispatch by Sam Van Wassenbergh www.cell.com/current-biol...

Shifting my research program to exclusively study "Bads"

Seeking scientist volunteers for this fall! Want to practice science communication and help author a 🌟comic🌟 about your research? I need collaborators for the next cohort of SciComm & Comics art and design students. All countries and scientific fields eligible.

New preprint from some of my postdoc work on lungs! Co-led with Kaleb Hill, we studied smooth muscle and epithelial development in lizard lungs. Stay tuned for more! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New paper is officially out! Ratfish have a second jaw on their foreheads - CT + histology show they’re real teeth, built from the same tissues and signals as oral teeth. www.washington.edu/news/2025/09...

Our new paper is out in Royal Society Open Science! The metamorphic transition of the frog mouth: from tadpole keratinized mouthparts to adult teeth doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

My feather cell type paper is finally out! doi.org/10.1111/ede.... We’ve packed a ton of stuff into this paper but I’ll go through some highlights in this thread!

Hey folks out there who ❤️ to #CTscan things and ❤️ museums! the @amnh.org is hiring a Laboratory Manager for their Microscopy and Imaging Facility, a.k.a. the CT lab 🧪 careers.amnh.org/postings/4550

🦖 Presmykaiushchiiasia (Reptilia) = Petrograd: Akademiia nauk, 1915-1916. [Source]

Keeping it local for world lizard day- Rhineura floridana, also known as the Florida worm lizard or, brilliantly, the thunderworm, is a truly bizarre and wonderful creature. Eyeless, burrowing and restricted to the sandy soils of the sunshine state. What a fabulous weirdo!

Sphaerodactylus geckos loom large in my mind (but sit small on my hand)

1/6 Preprint Alert Ever thought that humans & chameleons look alike? We follow chameleon development from fertilisation to oviposition & uncover the process through which they form an epiblast lumen that exhibits striking similarity to human embryos #devbio #evodevo www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New Comparative Anatomy Textbook! Completely free to read and open access! doi.org/10.59319/YHF...

Here it is! Please welcome the AMAZING Mirasaura grauvogeli, a NEW MARVELOUS Drepanosaur published in NATURE today! This astonishing reptile lived during the Middle Triassic in Europe and it possessed an amazing crest made of plume-like structures! I was commissioned to bring it to life #paleoart

So proud of my academic sibling @ecokatsully.bsky.social for defending her PhD today! Well done, Kat! To celebrate, here are some classy photos 🦋 🐛

Go work with Blair!

Close-up of the toepads of the diploid edition of North America's gray treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis). You can tell this one is a male from the loose, gray skin on his throat.

🚨🐸 Frog Nerds Assemble 🐸🚨 Recently we published a paper on the phylogenetics and taxonomy of Australia and New Guinea's tree frogs, the Pelodryadidae. Link here: tinyurl.com/4udpmxsm What does this mean for you Litoria-lovers? There's a whole bunch more names to use! Let me explain ...

📢 The #BiodiversityHeritageLibrary is entering a bold new chapter – and we need your help! Today we release our official Call for Support. We’re seeking new hosts for BHL’s staff, infrastructure, and services. Learn more: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2025/06/tran... #BHLTransition #ILoveBHL

Foundations: please step up and take over the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). This is an absolutely essential scanned archive of all of the old journals and books from the 1500s to about 1920. Has been indispensable for my research. about.biodiversitylibrary.org/call-for-sup...

So disappointing. Biodiversity Heritage Library has been a CRUCIAL resource for my work and countless others.

You want to apply #ATACseq in your emerging model organism, but you don't know where to start? Is #ATACseq the best method for my research questions? Search no more! We got you covered with our new review: doi.org/10.1002/jez.... Excellent collaboration with @gevol.bsky.social

Hell yeah, @mads100tist.bsky.social

Pretty cool seeing both my developmental staging series at the @devdynamics.bsky.social table and #Lepidodactylus itself in San Juan for SDB! #2025SDB #2025ICDB #devbio #GeckoEvoDevo #mourninggecko

Excited to share a new #OA paper in @journalofanatomy.bsky.social detailing evolution and development of hemibacula: bizarre mineralized elements in hemipenes of croaking geckos. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #GeckoEvoDevo #Aristelliger

Going to #ICDB2025? Check out my poster on Thursday in the "Development and Evolution" section! Many of you may know me as a lizard biologist, but I'll be chatting about some of my postdoc work on comparative amniote development. Come see yet another reason why birds are so cool and weird! #SDB

Decided there's not enough lizards in the #ColorsOfSkullAnatomy collection 🦎 So, new to the gang: Phyllurus platurus (southern leaf tail gecko). An Aussie lizard of course, and one of the 1st specimens I scanned at Florida Museum in 2021 www.graysvertebrateanatomy.com/leaftail-gecko-skull-anatomy/

Head scales of the Sulcata tortoise, imaged with light sheet microscopy. Our new study in @cp-iscience.bsky.social reveals that their emergence is controlled by both chemical cues and mechanical forces. Read the full article here 🐢🔬🧪 www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Excited to share our new research in @cp-iscience.bsky.social! We reveal that tortoise head scales are sculpted through two distinct developmental processes - chemical signalling and mechanical folding 🐢🔬🧪 @lanevol.bsky.social @genevunige.bsky.social www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Millions of birds nest in the Arctic each year. But did you know they’ve been doing this since the Cretaceous? Can’t believe I finally get to share that our paper on the birds of the Prince Creek Formation is out in ‪@science.org (and on the cover)! 🧵 Art: Gabriel Ugueto ‪@serpenillus.bsky.social

New paper! Italian wall lizards have been introduced to urban areas across the world and do very well around humans.🦎 from a source population that has evolved with humans for millennia are more bold than 🦎 from nearby rural areas. Priming them for success in cities? academic.oup.com/jue/article/...

This is how your email found me.

I think it's imperative that you talk to your family and friends about this and contextualize that none of these changes will result in "savings". Turning the qatari plane into Air Force 1 will cost 1 billion. Trump's military parade will cost 25-45 million = zeroing out grad education.

Now at @asn-amnat.bsky.social, "Genome composition predicts physiological responses to temperature in polyploid salamanders" A project that @ecophysiology.bsky.social and I talked about since we were both PhD students! Funded by #NSF www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1...

Exciting to get to see embryos of new species in the lab! Here's an embryo of an Italian wall lizard (Podarcis siculus) from an introduced population here in NJ.

1/2 Very excited to announce the publication of our study on early anole embryogenesis @devdynamics.bsky.social Read the full article here! anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... @stowersinstitute.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk @oxfordwomenshealth.bsky.social @loyolachicago.bsky.social

Me every time there’s footage of a wall gecko used as b-roll on Love Island #Tarentola

In December I accepted a position as a senior investigator at the NIH in the National Human Genome Research Institute & Center for Genomics and Data Science Research. Bringing the party in the desert to Maryland. We are hiring postdocs & postbacs! Please reach out :)

🚨New publication alert!🚨 A big one! It might just be my *biggest* one: doi.org/10.1093/iob/... IMPORTANT THREAD! From the moment Dave Blackburn set me loose at the Florida Museum, I had a marvelous time using diffusible iodine-based contrast-enhanced CT (diceCT) to create anatomical datasets 🧪1/6

Hey it's international bat appreciation day 🦇 Here's a rendering of a skeleton of a Daubenton's free tailed bat I scanned for #oVertTCN. This AMNH specimen was collected in the Congo in 1910! This poor girl has quite a few broken bones 😢 See if you can spot them www.morphosource.org/media/000519...

It's graduate school application season, so here's your reminder that nobody should pay for a graduate degree in #ecoevo ! Here's a list of fully funded ecology, evolution, & organismal biology Masters' programs (please share!)! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

In case this is helpful to someone out there: I'm moving to Ball State University this August, and I'll have a support for MS students over the next three years (RAs/TAs) If your lab has talented students graduating this spring, I welcome them to reach out and talk about the opportunities.

A monumental loss.

Mossy leaf-tailed gecko, Uroplatus sikorae, Madagascar. These lizards have some of the most amazing camouflage in nature. I especially love the fractal fringing on the bottom jaw, feet, and body, which helps break up the lizard's outline. 🦎🌿 #herps

Come check out poster 185 in tonight's session at #biologists100 🐣! And for more detail, here's the full article recently published in @plosbiology.org journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...