Grab your snorkels and dive back in time with us - our new temporary #exhibition Feeding Without Jaws opens on Weds 12 Nov. The exhibition explores cutting-edge palaeontological research on the lives of unusual ancient fishes. For more info: www.birmingham.ac.uk/events/feedi... #LapworthRocks

Walled Lake representing.

Great pair of articles in this morning's Ann Arbor News highlighting the outstanding new leadership of the U-M Museum of Zoology and U-M Herbarium: Alison Davis Rabosky (left) and Thais Vasconcelos (right). 🍄🌿🌺🐚🪲🐟🐸🐍🐦🐿️

As droughts become longer and more intense, their toll on ecosystems could be far greater than we thought. Our new paper in @science.org shows how prolonged & extreme droughts cause dramatic, cumulative losses in ecosystem productivity across the globe www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Early stages of evolution of a flight patagia

One of my favorite Halloween time paintings by Fragonard -- The Magician

Biodiversity policy needs to look forward, not just backward. 🌍 Our new PNAS piece argues that predictive models - like those used in climate science - are key to guiding effective conservation decisions. doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #Biodiversity #Conservation #PNAS (1/2)

Why we aren’t lizards: the evolution of endothermy through optimizing life history Summary & Analysis by Kaleigh Remick of “The Evolution of Homeothermic Endothermy via Life History Optimization” by Rubalcaba www.amnat.org/an/newpapers...

Super cool experimental study demonstrating how warming and species richness alter mass-abundance structure of ecological communities.

Trophic rewilding depends on the assumption that replacing lost megafauna with alternative species can generate similar benefits. This new review by Bescond-Michel et al. challenges that belief. 🌏🌐🧪

Here you go!

John Atkinson Grimshaw, British (1836-1893), Twilight, 1871, oil on card laid down on panel, 56 x 38 cm, private collection

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

Mosaic anatomy in an early fossil squamate, from the Jurassic of Scotland www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📣 New Publication! Biodiversity supports functions that drive ecosystem services and disservices. Measuring these functions is key to evaluating conservation strategies and land use change. We present methods to quantify ecosystem functions using the sentinel approach: doi.org/10.1111/2041...

Alien, 1979. (Directed by Ridley Scott)

One of the best songs from one of the all-time great albums.

We have a new paper (in GEOLOGY!) Using a new way to look at sabkha sediments with clumped isotopes, we found that warming in the Miocene was not that significant in the horse latitudes. Most of the warming was likely in the high latitudes. 🧪⚒️ Link: pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/...

What could go wrong?

New paper out yesterday "New specimens of the arthrodire Bullerichthys fascidens Dennis and Miles 1980 show incipient site-specific osteichthyan-like tooth addition and resorption" Read it now in Swiss Journal of Palaeontology: sjpp.springeropen.com/articles/10....

🎉New paper with Brian Beaty: After the end-Permian ME, burrowers didn’t just return, they rewired seafloor chemistry. Shallow particle mixing revived C & S cycling (<200 kyr); full P recycling waited on deeper burrowers (>1 Myr). Congratulations Brian! paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

1000 elite biohackers using technology from the year 3000 and a mountain of LSD could not invent a creature half as bananas as the anteater

Yep. Old.

My blue is your blue: different people’s brains process colours in the same way www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Truth. And such a waste for the future of the state of Indiana after five generations of investment to elevate Hoosier kids to world class status. thebtownbee.com/2025/08/31/t...

Bumping to the Fishes! and Science feeds🐟🧪

🌍 Humans erased a quarter of Earth’s carbon stores Land use has depleted global vegetation and soil carbon by 24% (344 PgC), equal to 50 years of fossil fuel emissions. 🔗 www.cell.com/one-earth/fu... #SciComm #ClimateCrisis 🧪

The 2025-26 Eco-Evo job list is out. Good luck to those applying! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Next in our August issue: A Journal Club from Peter Doll, "Addressing disparities in global biodiversity data" Web link: https://bit.ly/46YENzO

The Awkward Age, between 3 and 2 million years ago, was when early Homo rubbed along with at least two lineages of Australopithecus, and Paranthropus too. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Unraveling the role of environmental and anthropogenic drivers in shaping global patterns in mammal diversity vist.ly/32pcf #FunctionalDiversity #Macroecology #PhylogeneticDiversity

Quite troubling: The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly | PNAS @reeserichardson.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Hubbell's neutral model of biodiversity is founded on tree inventory data for Barro Colorado Island – which don't fit the model. A better one is the compound abundance distribution involving the geometric series. A preprint of the newly submitted BCI paper is here: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

I AM SHRIEKING 💀🤣 Forget the statue at City Hall, this guy is the *real* Spirit of Detroit. 🫡

A well-deserved award to a brilliant colleague and good friend!

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

Fantastic to be back in Newfoundland for our research on the early animals of the #Ediacaran

Hi Everyone. This is my first post on Bluesky as I seek to spread excitement about paleontology, animation, anatomy, and (as the current president of) the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology! #StuartSumida #SocietyofVertebratePaleontology #SVP #Paleontology #VertebratePaleontology

Burmese pythons don’t believe in waste, digesting not only the muscle and fat of their prey, but the bones as well, thanks to newly discovered cells. www.iflscience.com/newly-discov...

Dune, Where’s My Car?

If universities anywhere are hiring an Evolutionary Biologist/Paleontologist please let me know! I'm on the market for Tenure Track positions!! You can find more about my research on fish evolution here: rtfigueroa.wixsite.com/my-site

A short video showing how to infer gene trees in Mesquite 4. youtu.be/xkAHBRIJ4CU 🧪 #evolbio #phylogenomics @bembidion.bsky.social

The progressive evolution of cold-adapted species www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Onset of extensive human fire use 50,000 y ago | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

For sauropsids lovers: Two fresh papers map trait spaces of birds, turtles and crocodiles to reveal what disappears when species go extinct www.nature.com/articles/s41... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... 🧪🌐🪶 🧮➕📏 #trait, #traits, #FunctionalTraits

European mammal turnover driven by a global rapid warming event preceding the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Ohh, forgot this. It took SoaceX about 4.5 years to develop Falcon 9. Only Falcon 9... JFK laid out the goal to land a man on the moon on Sept 12 1962. NASA ran the show and developed Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo including developing every step of how to land on the Moon. It was done July 24 1969.