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. 🐝🌱

The top three science funders are the US, China, and Japan. The three fund more science than every other country, combined. In 2024, the US funded more scientific research than China and Japan, combined. The US also funds more science than every other country except for Japan and China, combined.

Researchers have filmed thousands of climbing catfish scaling waterfalls, providing a rare insight into the daring migration of an enigmatic fish. Learn more: https://scim.ag/4lDlFux

Tadpoles have...TEETH?! An evolutionary novelty of anuran tadpoles, the taxonomic distribution of keratinized labial teeth remains a mystery. Yet here, variation in row number was studied in a phylogenetic context! If you're bitten by a tadpole do you turn into a frog..? 🌍🧪👇

Attention insect pollinators: no need to worry, this flower is perfectly safe!

Cells can form patterns within themselves just like embryos do. How? Connie Yan's new preprint shows how the anterior-posterior cytoskeleton pattern in Stentor is dictated by regionalized scaffolding proteins www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

this sort of thing is unpleasant enough

📖Published📖 Cooper et al. present DeepDiveR, an R package companion for the DeepDive Python program, facilitating estimation of biodiversity from fossil occurrence data. Read more here 👇 buff.ly/jkCtFzH

Paper submitted. Been looking at this one for too long. Time to let someone else take a swing at it.

"The (Non)Academic Community Forming around Replications" by Sheena Bartscherer and @martinreinhart.openbiblio.social.ap.brid.gy Preprint: doi.org/10.31235/osf... Few quotes follow...

"The OS movement tends to operate with historical and methodological amnesia, e.g., employing and introducing concepts and methodologies as their own, despite them...having long traditions that predate the reform movement (see, e.g., Metascience stemming from the philosophy of science)."

Really great to see some discussion of the amount of outside influence impact replication and reform conversations. At some point in time we really need to ask ourselves “what do all these billionaires want with the narrative science is broken and influence on its process?”

Want to do a PhD on White Sharks using high-powered imaging to analyse form and function of their teeth and jaws? You will work with me and the dream team @charlie-huveneers.bsky.social @meyer-sci.bsky.social @weisbeckerbblab.bsky.social & #SARDI at Flinders Uni 🦈🦷🦴 Interested? Get in touch!

✨Development meets design in this embryonic chameleon lung 🫁 🦎. Smooth muscle swirls 🟣 and branching tips and cartilage 🟢 come together in reptilian lung morphogenesis. Image taken by @drkatiegoodwin.bsky.social 🔬🧪 #FluorescenceFriday #DevBio

Earliest traces of lobe-finned fishes showing adaptations for moving on land, from the Early Devonian (~400 mya) of Poland! Trace fossils include snout, tail, body drag, and pectoral impressions, & a four-finned resting trace in marginal-marine sediments. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🐟🐾

📢 deeptime: an R package that facilitates highly customizable and reproducible visualizations of data over geological time intervals 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/2096... Fully #openaccess in @bigearthdata1.bsky.social with insight about deeptime📦 development and code examples! #rstats #geology #paleontology

In case you've ever wondered, I talked with @amjeve.bsky.social about science, myself, and the future of #DevBio as part of the Pathway to Independence Fellowship @biologists.bsky.social 🧪 journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

The reproductive system of birds is an evolutionary marvel. Their only functioning oviduct is a fantastic conveyor belt of weirdness, of which parts are still mysterious. An illustration made for a pet bird magazine. You can read more on my Cara page: cara.app/post/e9f92d4...

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

Retinoic acid-responsive hox genes in hoxba and hoxbb clusters direct pharyngeal pouch formation in zebrafish https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.23.666262v1

As is typical of exhibits, the Chicago Archaeopteryx display opened last fall with a not-quite-finished animated mural. The real version has been done for months, but installation labor is always a limiting factor. Anyway, it’s up now—enjoy the non-glitchy sky and moving ground plants!

Well, this came out today. Terror birds (Phorusrhacidae)were not friends, but food. Bueno, hoy salió esto. Las aves del terror (Phorusrhacidae) no eran amigos, sino comida. #PaleoSky #Phorusrhacidae #Paleontology #Fossils royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Oh so that's why everyone in science journalism Twitter was talking about drepanosaurs yesterday

PRDM paralogs are required for Meckel's cartilage formation during mandibular bone development https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.17.665392v1

Got photos of your paleontology field or lab work you’d like to share? Please see the announcement below! Link to submit images here: vertpaleo.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?...

evolution is wild

New paper today about the evolution of the wrist along the dinosaur to bird transition: a bird-like configuration appeared in predatory dinosaurs first, as suggested by new exceptionally preserved hands of oviraptors and troodontids www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This postdoc position is still open! Apply if you want to come work with us on asymmetric cell divisions in spiralian embryos! postdocs.stanford.edu/prospective/...

🐟Fascinating section of a Styloichthys changae scale, showing vascular and lamellar bone layers (yellow arrows indicate the embedded multiple-ridged odontodes)🦷 dt, dentine tubules; e, enamel, mc, mesh canals; pc, pore cavities; puc, pulp cavities 📄Published in JSP by Cui et al.: buff.ly/xUffry0

Our new paper just out compares the diverse mandibular mechanics during biting in Devonian lungfishes: iScience www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

It's #fossilfriday so here's a jaw of the giant Permian ray finned fish Brazilichthys from #Piaui, #Brazil

wow, are we actually doing this

A chance discovery of a 350 million-year-old fossil reveals a new type of ray-finned #fish theconversation.com/a-chance-dis...

New paper day! From Conrad Wilson's MSc comes a new predatory fish from the earliest Carboniferous deposits of Blue Beach, Nova Scotia. This is the first fish in the fossil record to have its largest teeth in the rear of its jaws. #paleontology #vertpaleo #paleosky

New data! New data! Wow these results are cool! So excited to share these with everyone!

When educators freak out about AI, it's not because we're lamplighters fighting the invention of the lightbulb, or because we're lazy and don't want to innovate our teaching methods - it's because there's a genuine learning crisis at hand, the stupifying of society. 3/3

LLM use in research and writing doesn't just mean students aren't doing the work, it means they literally abandon the very skills development and knowledge acquisition necessary for any intellectual job, let alone to know whether or when LLMs are giving them bullshit or useful info. 2/n

Which is another reason their use by students to *do* the work of research and writing for them is skills-annihilating. No, LLMs are NOT just like calculators, a simple tool that can be used well or not. In math you still have to show your work. 1/n