Today's bombshell in @nature.com by Lindsay Zanno & James Napoli @jgn-paleo.bsky.social (bit.ly/4qBE6ng) shows that putative juvvy T. rex fossils actually are Nanotyrannus. I reviewed the manuscript, so Nature invited me to write the News & Views commentary. Free link: rdcu.be/eNv94 🦖

Honored (and surprised!) to receive a Philip Leverhulme Prize, but grateful to @leverhulme.ac.uk and @cam-archaeology.bsky.social for their support.

The Trust is thrilled to announce the 2025 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winners. Congratulations to this year’s cohort. Thirty extraordinary researchers from across a range of disciplines: leverhulme.ac.uk/news/2025PLP

Today was the ceremony for new fellows at the #BritishAcademy - it was wonderful 🤩. I am thrilled and so grateful to the colleagues who nominated me, elected me, and the many colleagues, students, friends, our kids & family, & specially Rob 😍 who have so enriched my life and career ❤️

I'm really excited about this new paper, with @dayvees.bsky.social, where we use simulations to explore how herbivore tooth growth and development, demography, and dental wear mediate the seasonal signal preserved in serially sampled teeth! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Horrific reporting from the AP on the Myanmar families watching their kids starve to death from Trump and Musk’s aid cuts apnews.com/article/myan...

⚠️Paper Alert!⚠️ Excited to share this paper with @roccoro.bsky.social where we examined whether ceramic technology in Saharan Africa was the result of a single or multiple episodes of innovation & diffusion rdcu.be/eJi3g

Who's got unfused parietals and probably wasn't a stem snake? This guy.

My explainer about the Yunxian 2 study

New York Times obituary for one of New York’s greatest characters. RIP Mark, and you’d enjoy the Romanian palinka we’re toasting in your honor tonight! www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/s...

And see this excellent coverage from our Department @cam-archaeology.bsky.social www.arch.cam.ac.uk/news/early-h...

Giraffes, long considered a single species, are in fact four. https://scim.ag/4n2po6f

Come work with me! (Or Gabrielle or James) stonybrooku.taleo.net/careersectio...

📣 Work with us! 📣 The Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge is looking to appoint an Assistant Professor in Zooarchaeology. 📅 Closing date: 15 September 👉 More info and how to apply: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/assista...

Really cool study looking at how behaviour precedes morphological change across taxa - and implications for human evolution 💀🧪 massive congrats to all the authors, including @vivek123.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Pleased to present our new preprint on sleep and circadian rhythms among the Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia. This is a fascinating system for exploring sleep biology. Lots of variation in light exposure, housing type, and subsistence. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 below.

Our new study shows how animal biodiversity loss is a climate problem: tropical forests recover far less carbon where seed dispersers have declined. We’re not just losing forests – we’re losing their ability to regrow. Reversing that trend could align biodiversity recovery with climate solutions.🧵

Fabulous news that @martamlahr.bsky.social has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy 🍾🍾🍾

Justus has shared every adventure in Turkana with us since 2010 - wonderful friend and colleague

Some personal news…

Molecules from 20-million-year-old rhino-relative teeth are among the oldest ever sequenced go.nature.com/4lFx4KN

Check out our new paper, led by former postdoc and current colleague Daniel Green on 18 Ma proteins in fossil teeth! Tim Cleland, a proteomics wizard, did the measurements. What's the take home? We hope to use protein fingerprints to study mammal and hominin phylogenetics! bit.ly/OldProteome

I'm happy to share this review article, where I attempt to ponder about missed opportunities in archaeological statistical modelling.

Around 70,000 years ago, our ancestors in Africa began exploiting different habitats. Flexibility to survive in deserts to rainforests enabled their successful spread ‘Out of Africa’. Find out more about the study co-led by Andrea Manica @eegcam.bsky.social 👇 bit.ly/4e6i9H7

🚨 I'm looking for #Postdoc opportunities starting this September! 🧑‍🔬🔍 I'm a highly motivated researcher with experience in R, network analysis, and multivariate statistics. My focus is on the evolution of ecosystems and biodiversity over deep time.

"Nouvelle galerie de paléontologie et de préhistoire en Éthiopie" Le Musée national d’Éthiopie a inauguré sa nouvelle galerie permanente intitulée « Million years of Life and Culture in Ethiopia » palevoprim.labo.univ-poitiers.fr/2025/05/15/2... @palevoprim.bsky.social @cnrsecologie.bsky.social

🦏🦣🦌 LARGE paper alert!!! We tracked 60 million years of large herbivore evolution—over 3,000 fossil species—to uncover how ecosystems have changed and reorganized through time. What we found might help us understand the next big tipping point 🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The area of NSF that includes programs in biological and cultural anthropology and archaeology is the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences. The White House 2026 budget request for this area is a reduction of 77.3% from 2024 levels. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

Elisabeth Vrba obituary www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10..... My thanks to Georg Vrba, Elisabeth’s husband, for information and photos on her life and work in South Africa.

Hello, Our paper on enamel proteins from Paranthropus robustus has finally been peer reviewed, please have a read here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Paranthropus robustus has been puzzling scientists since its discovery in 1938 in South Africa, where a high number of fossils have been found.

Exciting news at Cambridge! We are launching the Darwin-Hamied Centre to promote research at the intersection of biodiversity and economics christs.cam.ac.uk/news/darwin-.... We are advertising two 5-year Senior Research Fellowships—application deadline 22nd June! christs.cam.ac.uk/vacancies-ch...

Philip Leakey unveiling the blue plaque that will mark Louis Leakey’s home here in Cambridge @cam-archaeology.bsky.social

Complete sequencing of ape genomes on our cover this week! 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... @nature.com

New video alert! 🚨 For those that missed it, Dr John Rowan’s talk, titled ‘The biographic context of hominin evolution in eastern Africa’ is now available to watch on our YouTube! Watch it here: youtu.be/5dJubP9JSfc?...

Things are going from bad to worse at NSF; www.science.org/content/arti...

Excited to share this new #OpenAccess pub. It completely overturns our understanding of...nothing. It won't be in your newsfeed. Sometimes #science advances by basic, gut-it-out research. Would love comments about our approach to fossil alpha-taxonomy. paleoanthropology.org/ojs/index.ph...

Please join us next week, 8th May 2025, at 13:00 BST, for our final talk of the academic year which will be given by Dr John Rowan, University of Cambridge. More details below 👇 If you would like to attend, please register here: liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regi... We hope to see you there!

This is illegal.

🚨new paper alert! 🚨 “Paleoecological implications of the large mammals from a late glacial hyena den at Besaansklip (southwestern Cape, South Africa)” We present a detailed analysis and description of the mammalian fauna from a late glacial fossilized hyena den in South Africa. (Link below)

“Taxonomy and systematics underpin all aspects of palaeobiology, and it is vital that their importance is recognized by funders, institutions and publishers, and that we continue to train ECR in these disciplines to avoid an ‘extinction of experience’ in specimen- and field-based research.”

I'm excited to share a new paper, led by Marta Jarzyna and Leo Ohyama, on regional species pools-- a fundamental concept in ecology and biogeography that is poorly defined and understood, but which is essential for understanding and protecting biodiversity. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Some members of the #AmniotaLab are exploring the paleontological collections in London this week! Stay tuned for more cool paleo stuff

The obituary of Isaiah Nengo John Rowan mentioned in his #HumanEvo25 talk is here www.nature.com/articles/s41... (you need to register, but it’s free access. Or free to read at rdcu.be/ejH8J)

Scientists must push back against the threat of rising white nationalism and the dangerous and pseudoscientific ideas of eugenics https://go.nature.com/4jGqiUc

I was sad to hear this week of the passing of paleoanthropologist Philip Rightmire. My favorite memories of Philip come from 2010 and 2011 when I was helping to direct the Dmanisi field school and Philip, emeritus faculty at that point, got to relieve his student days and join us in the field.

Legacies of colonialism can stifle science. But there are ways to rein it in.

I recently did a thoroughly enjoyable two-part podcast with David Sloan Wilson at ProSocial World (@prosocialworld.bsky.social). The topic was Hunter-Gatherer Societies, Human Origins, and Modern Democracies. Feedback welcome!