Some species are lost to history. Others are out here spitting acid and crushing bones. I'll be posting genetics & evolution facts for both tonight! #2026MMM Skeets by @cegamorim.bsky.social @fervillanea.bsky.social @n8upham.bsky.social @sexchrlab.bsky.social @acstone.bsky.social and me!

And March Mammal Madness would not be possible without the incredible achievements of scientists the world over, so many funded by those historical engines of excellence- the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin #2026MMM

Welcome to the 14th Annual March Mammal Madness! This year MMM Celebrates LIBRARIES in honor of 10 years since the launch of the LibGuide! libguides.asu.edu/MarchMammalM... #2026MMM

Are you ready? #2026MMM

“Seven elephant seal pups at Año Nuevo State Park have tested positive for the virus, known as H5N1, becoming the first recorded cases in northern elephant seals. They are among about 30 seals that have died at the park since late last week and the first to have been tested, said Roxanne Beltran”

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

Rev. Jesse Jackson's "I *am* somebody..." remains one of the all-time great pieces of 20th century rhetoric / agitprop And he could deliver it at a Black separatist meeting, the Democratic National Convention, or on god-blessed Sesame Street (see below 🥹) RIP to the Voice of the Voiceless

Do subterranean mammals have hyper-elastic skin thanks to super-sized hyaluronan (HA) polymers? We challenge this popular idea in a new preprint, presenting the first skin elasticity measurements of burrowing rodents & HA size profiles for Ansell’s mole-rat (1/8) 🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

In good news, a little one was born in Utah🦒 www.sltrib.com/news/2026/01...

Pre-announcement ... keep an eye out for news of our upcoming #Biodiversity #Bioinformatics Summer School 21-26 June in Germany co-organised by @sib.swiss & @denbi.bsky.social ... sign up to the mailing list to be sure not to miss it! www.sib.swiss/training/upc...

"And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world... We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality." www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN8e...

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

Midnight Diner available on Netflix is beautiful, haunting, affecting. Subtitles not dubbing. Poetry of the city from a great Japanese director. www.netflix.com/watch/80113542

Happy Winter Solstice! Beer can, pinhole camera photos of the Summer to Winter Solstice (2024) and the Winter to Summer Solstice (2025). You never know quite what you're going to get with these photos, set the beer can pointing towards the sun at hopefully the correct angle and wait 6 months!

Finally published: #Cryptic species and taxonomic revision of kangaroo mice, the rodent genus #Microdipodops. 4 new species! Integrative taxonomy! Great co-authors! @n8upham.bsky.social @mammalogists.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jmam...

High-resolution land-use maps from 1960 to 2100 🌎🧪 🌐 www.cell.com/one-earth/fu...

A new study of the last 50 years of US pop music shows “a significant increase in stress-related language, alongside declines in positive sentiment and lyrical complexity.”

A Red Fox in a tree looking absolutely DEVIOUS 🦊 😈 #mammals #foxes

A big review of the evolution of bats: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio

Halloween News: Meet a new vampire fly (Hippoboscidae) 🧛‍♂🪰 1 of 10 species found on citizen-reported bird carcasses in Singapore: Even dead birds can have productive afterlives! See host records, annotated images, pictorial keys & DNA diagnostics here: doi.org/10.1155/jzs/...

My lab is hiring a 2-yr hummingbird evolution and genomics postdoc and a 1-yr salaried research and lab tech. Both with full U. Wyoming benefits. Please spread the word! Info below. Best consideration date Nov 1, start dates early Spring 2026.

Reminder, we’re hiring 2 PhD students for next year!! I’m extending the deadline to Nov 1, but please get your app in soon if you’re interested in joining us! More info is on our webpage. 🦠🦑 Please share with ECRs you know as well and check out our other open positio. (Postdoc!)

Just finished a first draft of an ecological power analyzer app. Been watching students struggle to figure out sample sizes. Hope this helps. Fork it, steal it, use it. Mostly accurate. Work in progress. ufduttonlab.github.io/peep-power/

The global whaling industry experienced a boom c. 1840-1950 as technology allowed whalers to hunt the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. Under standard models, we would have expected krill populations to have *exploded*. Instead, they DROPPED exponentially. Let's talk about the KRILL PARADOX.

A big win for one of California’s smallest native mammals 🎉 The CA Fish and Game Commission voted unanimously today to declare the Pacific pocket mouse a candidate species under the California ESA, granting protections for them as the state conducts a yearlong review. Read on ➡️ bit.ly/474L4Iz

Goodall transcribes field notes by lamplight in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park c.1960

www.theguardian.com/technology/2... Great article linking Web origins w/ AI today: "Hard to imagine a big tech company agreeing to share the world wide web for no commercial reward like Cern allowed me to. That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research."

🐍🦎 We're all familiar with snakes, but have you heard of legless lizards? Join Collections Manager Nefti Camacho behind the scenes in the Museum's Herpetology Collection and learn the similarities and differences between the two species!

The cutest!!! Sea snail larvae are just adorabubbles 🥹 #marineplankton 🦑

hey bluesky 👋 visa hurdles mean I’m looking for opportunities outside the US. I’m a computational biologist (bacterial + phage genomics, postdoc in Koonin’s group @ NIH). I am interested in teaming up on funding apps. reach out if this resonates!

Biology Department xkcd.com/3140/

The GRFP lives!! (due end of October) www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

When & where have species of bats, rodents, & shrews been collected across the 54 mountains of the Madrean Sky Islands? Damien Rivera in our lab led this effort to find out! New preprint "Uncovering historical small mammal biodiversity among the Madrean Sky Islands" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Beauty of a figure!!

Bargibant’s Pygmy Seahorse. #AGoodPlace Video credits: www.instagram.com/reel/C5iNmVf...

'Here, we detail the biological, environmental and experimental factors that can affect circadian rhythms of mice and provide recommendations for designing and reporting experiments for in vivo metabolic studies.' www.nature.com/articles/s42...

"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.

At Cerro Pelon, the monarch sanctuary.

#teamPeach #booMelons

Thank you for the write-up @johnhawks.net in particular for dedicating space to explaining mucin structure and function. The gene from Denisovan to Neanderthal to modern mucus open.substack.com/pub/johnhawk...

🧵 Here is SS 433, the first identified microquasar. It is about one of the most exotic star systems known, a binary star microquasar consisting of a stellar-mass black hole and its companion, a giant star. The star is about 30 solar masses, ... ➡️ www.desy.de/news/news_se... 🔭 🧪 #cosmology

'In order for AI to be scientifically useful, it needs to be scrutinised to the same standard as other scientific findings. This requires that the scientific community can reproduce your AI model or, indeed, further develop it, leading to greater understanding and interoperability'

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

Sagui centrál! Crew of Black-tufted-ear Marmosets (Callithrix penicillata) at my uncle-in-law's house outside of São Paulo last week 🙏🏻

Morning #bird A little baby broad billed hummingbird is waking up in Madera Canyon, AZ. #birdphotography #photography #birding #birds #wildlifephotography

Explore the Cactus Mouse (_Peromyscus eremicus_) genome!

Monthly reminder: Many people have a book in them, but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness, cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain, find the Blade of No One Made You Do This, and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.