This week we had a visitor! Leah, from the Ungar Lab at the University of Arkansas, spent two days in our fossil collections studying the teeth of mammoths and mastodons.It's always fun hosting researchers at ISM, especially students. #FossilFriday

Is this just another way to send tech bros money

Actual “AI” literacy would involve explaining why it's not and never will be a reliable source of information nor will it ever be a replacement for research or creativity.

#fossilfriday this week saw the description of a new gomphothere from the Clarendonian of Virginia: Chesalophodon gulottai. smithsonian.figshare.com/articles/boo...

#FossilFriday The largest bone in the skeleton—the femur—often survives the test of time. It is the eighth most common vertebrate mammal post cranial element I’ve documented in county museum collections across the Midwest so far. #Palaeontology #CitizenScience Lost Bones marcusbrandel.substack.com

Goals lol

I saw this movie with a good friend and the validation I'm getting from everyone who had the exact same instantaneous reaction we did is... beautiful.

There is a new Ryan Gosling movie out apparently and the only thing I know about it from posts here is that the centrifuge is unbalanced, and I’m delighted that this fact has come across my feed many many many times today. You’re my people 😂

The only “online debate” I’ve seen about this movie is about how he loaded the centrifuge, and it’s not much of a debate - we all agree that Ryan Gosling doesn’t know how to load a centrifuge www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie...

Out today is our paper 'Genomic history of early dogs in Europe', in which we uncover the identity of the dogs that lived in Europe before agriculture—during the Paleolithic & Mesolithic periods: doi.org/10.1038/s415.... A thread ⬇️ (10) @biouea.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social

Fantastic news! 🦋🦋 Link to full report in 🧵 www.worldwildlife.org/news/stories...

Third installment of #mammothmarch2026 a cast of a Columbian mammoth footprint found at the Carson City Prison, Nevada. On display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, California. #fossilfriday #naturalhistorymuseumoflosangelescounty #prehistoricnevada #mammoth

#fossilfriday it’s been a very busy week visiting the collections @ucmpberkeley.bsky.social to study the gomphotheres houses here. Enjoy the three holotypes I have had the pleasure of studying/scanning this week: Megabelodon minor, Gomphotherium cingulatum, and Trilophodon simpsoni!

It looks like an underwater armadillo

Have student or early career mammalogists looking to attend the 2026 meeting? Apply for travel awards!

American Society of Mammalogists, the deadline to apply for travel awards for the annual meeting is March 15. Visit the "instructions" tab at www.mammalsociety.org/index.php/co...

Rebuild those programs BIGGER

The Curling Controversy at the Winter Olympics Isn’t What You Think www.wired.com/story/2026-w...

Scientists: if you have pursued/secured philanthropic funding in the wake of federal research funding cuts, I want to talk to you. Reposts appreciated!

Canadian fossil reveals one of the first plant-eating animals www.reuters.com/science/cana...

Japan's ancient 'tigers' were actually cave lions, DNA evidence shows ⛏️🧬🦁🇯🇵 phys.org/news/2026-02...

The grasslands of western India are, in the popular imagination, the remains of woodlands lost under British rule — areas to be reforested, not conserved. But an analysis of medieval songs and stories reveals the grasslands predate British colonization.

New paper emerging from our Paleosynthesis project @paleosynth.bsky.social. In www.nature.com/articles/s41..., we highlight the value of databases to #paleontology and the importantce of sustained funding. Our finding are probably applicable to other science fields as well.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... The first Early Pleistocene (ca 1 Ma) fossil terrestrial vertebrate fauna from a cave in New Zealand reveals substantial avifaunal turnover in the last million years

New Date: February 23!

I desperately want this

Too late for me, but this is excellent news for millions of people who suffer with this condition.

So power imbalance and coercive behavior is taken as a price to be paid. Anything becomes permissible as long as things appear consensual. Those with power and money keep it, and many look the other way to not jeopardize funding, field camps, their opportunities. The problems are pervasive.

It's becoming so exhausting to be angry all the time.

Just as a quick note while we discuss all the new (and familiar) names in the Epstein files: be careful about saying "everyone knows" about prominent people who are predators. People new to the field, people less connected (often marginalized folks), people who are adjacent, etc. may not know.

(11) In 2013, Horner was awarded the Romer-Simpson Medal by the @societyofvertpaleo.bsky.social (its highest honor). I was at the meeting and saw his acceptance speech. Given this, I would urge those still in SVP to perhaps call on the Society to RESCIND the Medal and suspend his membership...

Yep. The men who clustered around JE were already well funded, mostly at rich private institutions. Indeed that was their half of the bargain: JE wanted association with big names, and found that misogyny flattery and money reeled them in.

Hmm, sounds like we need a refresher. The issue of whether everyone's favorite long-neck is called Brontosaurus or Apatosaurus (or both) has *nothing* to do with which skull was historically included on museum mounts! 🧵#FossilFriday

#FossilFriday: The Pacific mastodon, Mammut pacificus, known from California and Idaho. This species was described in 2019. This is the second of two species of Mammut from North America, the other being Mammut americanum.

Anyone who says that people are lazy and won't work if there is UBI are telling on themselves. Many people volunteer for charities, help neighbours in need, organise community events all the time without getting paid for it. People want to feel valuable., that won't change.

"Not only don't people work less when they are guaranteed an income, they might actually put in more effort at work. And the fact that they have more money to spend leads to the creation of more jobs." Nobel Prize–winning economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Imagine driving down the Miracle Mile in 1967 and seeing this in your rearview mirror... Fear not, it's just sculptor Howard Ball in a VW towing one of his fiberglass mammoths to be installed at the La Brea Tar Pits.

🦣 The Mastodon giganteus of North America /. Boston: J. Wilson, 1852.. [Source]

Early Arthropods xkcd.com/3199/

New enamel pins will drop on my site this Friday 1/30 @ 10 am PST! 💕 🔗 here to preview all the new designs: shop.fossilforager.art Reshares appreciated to get the word out! #sciart

Feels just like Twitter 🤣

Wildlife megafauna! Microbial evolution! Poop! This research has it all. 🧪 news.ncsu.edu/2026/01/envi...

Species shift their ranges in response to climate change, but many can't keep up. The resulting "community-climate disequilibrium" can impair ecosystem function and cause counterintuitive dynamics, like short-term gain but long-term loss onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Being a journalist is sick: I just contacted a pre-eminent jaguar conservationist in Argentine with a question that has been weighing on me for ages and he wrote back right away with an informed answer.

Science teachers. If you haven't seen it before, this link contains pretty much all the resources you will ever need. 1000s of files. #iTeachPhysics #Science 🧪 drive.google.com/drive/folder...

Thousands of scientists inflate their CVs with self-published studies that cost millions of dollars of public money 1 in 8 'special issues' is filled with articles written by the editor, particularly at the publisher MDPI @manuelansede.bsky.social english.elpais.com/science-tech...

The BLM has moved to revoke permits that allowed the American Prairie non-profit to graze bison on roughly 60K acres of public land in MT, prioritizing cattle ranching over bison conservation. They argue that bison do not qualify as "livestock" under federal grazing laws.