Very excited to share my exploration of the phylogenetics of early ray-finned fishes, out today in the Anatomical Record! Really busy day but I’ll have more info shortly. anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

🐠 Medaka (Oryzias latipes) ✨ A tiny fish with big developmental insights! 🧬 Medaka is perfect for studying sex determination, germ cell development, pigmentation, and environmental effects on embryos 📸 Image by Philipp Keller #ModelMonday #DevBio #EvoDevo

An early Triassic bone bed excavated at 78°N changes the story about how marine life recovered after the most cataclysmic extinction in Earth history ~252 million years ago. Learn more in this week's issue of Science: https://scim.ag/48bLsGI

“Welcome to my public talk. I have prepared slides and a speech for you, my friends, frenemies, and randos to understand this cool ring that shows writing when heated. Keep it secret; keep it safe. First slide: 🔥💍🔥.” Aka embargoed talks at a scientific conference. They just seem a weird choice.

#temnovember2025 day 10: Conjunctio We return to #temnovember with a little guy, #Conjunctio, a small #dissorophid from lower permian on New Mexico. Also its name soounds really close to spell in spanish, so Magic Frog;) #paleoart #sciart #temnospondyl #amphibian #permic

Scientific breakthroughs are rarely unique; someone else would’ve made them soon enough. But when prominent scientists cause harm, that harm isn’t inevitable; the world might simply have been better had the harm not been inflicted. liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/j...

It is a German conceit, that the vertebræ are absolutely undeveloped skulls.

(Recent art) Ceratodus nargan Illustration! Ceratodus is a wide spread prehistoric lungfish species that is related to the extant queensland lungfish. Here lies a species in the Early Cretaceous of Southern Victoria, Australia, in the Euremella formation. #paleoart #sciart #illustraation #fishart

New paper in JSP: Gonçalves & Luccisano reassess the taxonomy and phylogeny of Aeduellidae, Carboniferous ray-finned fish from Decazeville Basin, France 🐟 Results hint at a North American origin… or convergent traits that muddy the family waters. Read the study: buff.ly/huDEsiU #paleosky #fossilfish

One of the largest temmnospondyls ever to exist: the gigantic Koolasuchus was also the last non-lissamphibian temnospondyl to exist. It survived into the Early Cretaceous of Australia when all other stereospondyls were long gone #temnospondyls #paleoart

RRR is so mad he's making up sutures and bones. No idea how this made it through peer review. To quote a totally unacceptable comment in a referee report by the second author on this paper, "perhaps it was pal reviewed"

Loving this Nanotyrannus news. From a philsci perspective, the discourse around small Maastrichtian tyrannosaurs has deviated profoundly from the more widely applied standards of the field, so seeing this debate finally settled is very satisfying.

We need to be more honest about the nature of the job market with students, and one way of doing that is by showing them the data. Turns out, we also need better data collection on (at least US) paleo careers www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

🔬 Applications are now open! Join MBL’s world-renowned Advanced Research Training Courses, where scientists from around the globe come together to explore new ideas, master cutting-edge techniques, and become part of a dynamic network. ➡️Apply today: go.mbl.edu/courses

This is a super cool paper from the Hejnol group that should be a top reference for a lot of animal biodiversity/zoology courses.....origins of the bilaterian anus from the gonopore. Just drop this figure right into your slide deck. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?

This #fossilfriday , I wanted to post a very classic Pittsburgh fossil. This is Fedexia striegeli. It’s known from only one specimen (shown here) that was collected during a geology field trip to a roadcut near Pittsburgh in 2004. I credit it as the specimen that made me interested in local verts!

Trump slammed for demolishing White House before Canadians could burn it down again

New species of #coelacanth from the Early Triassic of China just dropped. Say hello to Whiteia anniae.🐟🧪 #FossilFriday www.nature.com/articles/s41...

People on twitter are losing their minds over this, including several scientists who I have to assume have either brain poisoned themselves or were always like this. People don't always cite what's best; they cite what they know & researchers from historically excluded communities get the short end.

About time. www.postandcourier.com/news/crime/c...

Well here it is, the list for this year #temnovember :D, as always, everyone is welcome to participate, see y'all in a week or so;)

Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels

Looking like we're on track to receive reviews on not one but two neat fossil papers this week. 😥

I know there are more important thing to be upset about right now, but I just want everyone to be mentally prepared for the Trump Whitehouse Ballroom social media "reveal" which is just AI slop of Trump dancing the Gangnam Style dance while ACDC's "Big Balls" plays in the background

This clarity and the ability of the ICM to be clearly shown to be wrong is a virtue worth emulating in other work that seeks to connect development, variation, and evolution. We can encourage this spirit by taking the rejection of popular and appealing theories a bit more seriously. 22/22

Are you interested in tooth evolution and evodevo? Ben Auerbach and I would like to direct your attention to our new preprint “The inhibitory cascade model and evolution in segmentally organized tissues.” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🦴🐭🐒🧪🦷🧬 @nsvitek.bsky.social @kevinlala.bsky.social

Really enjoying seeing the Inhibitory Cascade model get some rigorous criticism

Now out in Tim Smithson's Festschrift: neurocranial anatomy (incl. endocast) of the Early Devonian Durialepis et al. OA for your porolepiform pondering pleasure. W/ @gilespalaeo.bsky.social @jorgemondejar.bsky.social @tom-challands.bsky.social & S. Henderson www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Lots of meaty papers from Tim Smithson's festschrift. In addition, we contributed a little paper on a lungfish otoccipital from the early Mississippian of Nova Scotia. Nothing fancy but it shows affinities with groups previously known only from the Devonian. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Publication alert!🧪 Major new volume on early tetrapods and Carboniferous palaeoenvironments. The festschrift for Tim Smithson has just been published by Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh. Most articles are open access. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Sorry but this isn’t the win everyone thinks it is. Offering a lot of money to an elite few does absolutely nothing for the Canadian research landscape as a whole.

Excited to share our new paper where we find that the rise, decline and fall of clades is not explained by the usual suspects (diversity-dependence, ecological opportunities) but rather by species' insidious loss of macroevolutionary fitness: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/3

Hi Bluesky, I need your help. Please share broadly: We have an EXCELLENT job opening. We are looking for a non-Brazilian visiting scholar who specializes in Genomics applied to animal evolution, biogeography, and/or biodiversity. This is a one-year contract that can be extended for up to 4 years.

Wow😲🤩 🧪🧫 🧬🔬⚗️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is the second biology course now where some of the most engaged and excited students in my course are English majors. Perhaps this is a coincidence. But this is the beginning of a pattern I'm observing.

New in @science.org, meet Acronichthys maccagnoi, a new species from Late Creatacous Canada that changes what we know about the origins and evolution of one of the most successful fish groups on Earth.

Oldest winged insects: first Megasecoptera from the early Carboniferous (Serpukhovian) of Argentina onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Deep Ocean: Kingdom of the Coelacanth review — Attenborough peps up a very slow fish 🧪🌎🦑🐠

Trait-space disparity in fish communities spanning 380 million years from the Late #Devonian to present www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #traits #fish #evolution #ecology 🌏🧪

If your work involves Big Palaeo Data, you should be *begging* people to publish little local studies of new observational data, jfc. Without that you have absolutely bupkiss. I say this as someone with a foot in both camps:

I just (this morning) taught species concepts to a classroom full of first year non-majors. They figured out very quickly that all species concepts are flat wrong in some cases but useful when applied to appropriate cases. Crazy we're still wasting ink on this debate.

Do you like cichlids? Fossils? Fossil cichlids? Would you like to study them as part of a graduate degree at the University of Michigan, joining an NSF-funded project? Get in touch.

It's taken 41 years but I just saw my first Pileated Woodpecker. Fantastic animal.

More on the ancient foundation of animal development. Coyle & King illustrate how core regulatory modules were present in our pre-animal ancestors. The key was not invention, but recycling & new protein interactions. #CellBiology #multicellularity #protistsOnSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you know anyone interested in starting a Master's project working on ammonoid phylogenetics (or the phylogenetics of a mollusc group spanning the OAE2 event in the Late Cretaceous), then ask them to get in touch with me. The situation is a little tricky, as it would be funded by the remainder…

Interesting use of lithium isotopes to test for habitat specialization in Miguasha vertebrates. Notably, the authors find evidence for marine occupancy for tetrapodamorphs Eusthenopteron and Elpistostege, compared to freshwater occupancy in other common taxa. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

USGS released the Cooperative National Geologic Map, the first nationwide map with layered geologic data. It merges 100+ maps into analysis-ready layers for the lower 48 and can be explored on smartphones for easy field access. 🧪🗺️🧭⚒️ #USGS #Maps #NaturalResources www.usgs.gov/news/nationa...

A phylogeny for Heterostraci (stem-gnathostomes) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... @datadryad @wileyearthspace @fossilrob.bsky.social @evopalaeo.bsky.social

Our new pre-print (with @erichagen.bsky.social, @latinorchidbot.bsky.social, @jameswclark.bsky.social , Elizabeth Forward and Nick Priest) reveals rapid pollinator evolution in orchids, but no clear impact on diversification. Perhaps pollinator specialisation is not such a powerful force. 🐝🌱