My brachiopod project is now largely a bryozoan and coral project. Exciting times!

Excellent can’t wait to read!

Looking at articles on Zookeys and Zootaxa is far too much fun. I can’t get enough of all the awesome taxonomy that’s being done around the world. So much amazing work!

Osteichthyans--the bony fishes--are by far the most diverse group of living jawed vertebrates. Two papers out today in @nature.com feature remarkable new Chinese fossils that paint a picture of substantial morphological diversity among stem osteichthyans.

This is my artificial intelligence writing assistant, it provides work-flow enhancement and doubles as a fly swatter. I write much more efficiently with it! I’d like a 50 billion dollar evaluation please.

This is correct

He's perfect to me (from Moy-Thomas and Bradley Dyne (1938).

Most normal Permian animal

Paper looks very interesting but this is the most terrifying figure I have ever seen.

🐊 Fish (Lent)

Enjoying the decor in my office

Going to print this out and put it above my desk

This is what the geneticists in my department see when they read my papers.

Couldn’t agree more. Just today had a student start learning about Devonian brachiopods and the tiny animals that grew on them (corals, bryozoans, and worm-like things that haven’t been identified at the phylum level). They are excited to learn!

I’m ready to store some fossils! Brachiopods for now, hoping to get in the field soon and collect more fishes (and brachiopods too of course). And some office decorations @pusheen.bsky.social

Thank you to the city of Laurel for having a giant pothole in the middle of the road!

Love figtree excited to try this new tool

This site also has a palaeoniscoid somehow. They really did live forever

Fossil coral have always been a favorite of mine. The Devonian was a time of strange and wonderful corals of all shapes and sizes. In Michigan, I’ve found horn corals and colonies as big as basketballs. There are also tiny encrusting corals the size of a grain of rice. Awesome fossil!

What kind of lemon is this?

Government enforcement of an individual's gene-to-phenotype mapping on the basis of normative and essentialist arguments is eugenics. If you don't see how dangerous that is you know nothing about biology.

Link from Google Scholar is wrong, this should work www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/gro...

My invertebrate paleo class at Michigan State actually wrote a paper about this, arguing against the term “explosion” and tracing its history. www.academia.edu/download/837...

Cambrian animal party time

I’ve decided to start a brachiopod project.

Why should football players do speed and strength training when I can go so much faster in my car? This is how a lot of AI boosters sound these days.

Memory: Hans was the editor of my first paper, on Devonian fishes from Michigan. Two rounds of review that really improved it. When I spoke to Hans about doing a postdoc, he remembered my original paper. Just the little things he did that made you feel respected and valued as a junior scientist.

Can't express what a loss this is. Hans has been supportive of my career since I was an undergrad, and has supported countless others. His loss will be deeply felt across the entire field.

New one to add to the list of... interesting reviewer comments. Apparently Phylocode/Phylonyms is "where authors use what others have published and reinterpreted them under their names". Super helpful!

They aren’t sending their best. No actual argument presented besides “it’s inevitable”

Person who is invested in a blimp company: “Blimps are the future of transportation! They are inevitable and will make trains obsolete! Let me build a blimp tower in your small town please so I can hasten you losing your job.”

Been trying to learn about the pro-AI argument re: data centers. So far I’ve gotten “it’s inevitable like the internet” and vague promises of a cure to cancer that they are definitely working on. Not super convincing! Maybe tech needs a science communication class…

February 21, 1993, died on this day aged 105 years, Danish seismologist Inge Lehman. She discovered that the Earth has a inner core announcing it in 1936 with the shortest title for a paper ever: P' - after the seismic discontinuity between core and mantle shown by the P-waves

Love that we fossil fish people get to claim these little monsters. Fascinating animals that we still know very little about!

A new undergraduate student is excited to work on fossil brachiopods and snails. Looks like my giant collection of Devonian shells has a purpose now.

Does anyone have a PDF copy of "Functional Morphology of the Head of the Perch (Perca Fluviatilis L.): an Electromyographic Study" by Osse, 1968? Cannot get access to it through my library :(

Yesterday my colleague and I determined that we *do* have enough roundworms in store for lab. One of the rare times it is exciting to shout "we have worms!"

Internet is back up but I am still learning spanish from this radio station. So far I have learned that 'double cheeseburger' is 'double cheeseburger'

Internet on campus is down so I’m emulating my masters advisor and listening to the radio while drawing fossil fishes.

Interesting to see the similarities in dentition between a (presumably) fish eating dinosaur and piscivorous fishes with enlarged teeth. Reminds me of the Leopard Coral Grouper, which is a 'back fanged' macrodont. Excited to read the paper! Figure from Mihalitsis and Bellwood (2019).

It’s going to be another Spinosaurus day

Love seeing a paper that needs to be immediately added to lecture material. Excited to give this a read!

"Is there technology the left is excited about?" is the kind of question you only ask if you're wildly naive about technology. mRNA vaccines. Heat pumps. Offshore wind. Urban mining. Sodium batteries. But god forbid we're not fawning over every new implementation of Making Computers Bad At Math.

What in the world did I just read.

I think I’m getting the hang of teleosts.

Appreciate Skye for getting a better statement. I think it’s important that places like SVP are safe for everyone. I’ve spoken to people in other fields who actively avoid conferences for societies who don’t keep things safe, and I want to avoid SVP becoming like those (unnamed) societies.

Until this moment I had no idea there were legless geckos

Context for my non-Permian fish friends, this is what most Permian ray-finned fish fossils look like. From Stack and Gottfried (2022), Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Had to pay my respects to the queen