Safe travels all #2025SVP folks! En route to Birmingham via London…and who am I to argue with the NHM’s kids pack swag? 😁

Fascinating new study from @arctomet.bsky.social about how differences in parental care (or lack thereof) between Mesozoic dinosaurs and Cenozoic mammals might potentially affect interpretations of species diversity and trophic abundance in ancient communities. 🦖🧪

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

New PhD preprint! We studied the effects of habitat and multi-stage life cycles on salamander limb bones! Aquatic and terrestrial spp. have divergent morphs + semi-aquatic and multi-phasic spp. do their own thing + decoupled external and internal shape promote diversity. 🧪🦎 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

New Collection Study Grants for students and postdocs to come visit the @burkemuseum.bsky.social! Applications due 12/15/25. www.burkemuseum.org/collections-...

Interested in preregistration and registered reports? Historical Biology supports both! My new editorial on these developments: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

We’d also like to highlight research conducted with fossils from this locality by international scholars who are utilizing new technology like 3D scanning which allows us to work with fossils in new ways and have a digital record that increases accessibility to these fossils.

Celebrating #NationalFossilDay with a new paper describing specimens of the most whimsical of weasel relatives, leptarctine ("slender bear") mustelids, from the collections of @ucmpberkeley.bsky.social. Their teeth are so much fun to look at! 🦷 doi.org/10.5070/P9.4... (Cover image by P. Holroyd)

SVP members, please check your email for a copy of the message below that includes the link to access to the October 15 town hall hosted by SVP President @stuartsumida.bsky.social. We look forward to seeing you there!

Hi Bluesky, I need your help. Please share broadly: We have an EXCELLENT job opening. We are looking for a non-Brazilian visiting scholar who specializes in Genomics applied to animal evolution, biogeography, and/or biodiversity. This is a one-year contract that can be extended for up to 4 years.

Probably more than you ever wanted to know about #bat turbinals, in our most recent paper – check it out! anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

We're excited to share a new Special Issue on sabretooth taxa, broadly defined. From defining what makes a sabertooth/tusk to exploring fossil taxa and saber function. anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/19328494... Volume edited by Hartstone-Rose, Werdelin & Pollock

Excavated from the Pisces Point locality of Scollard Formation in Alberta, Canada, ~67 million years old, Acronichthys maccognoi, newly reported in @science.org, was recovered from ancient water body that flipped seasonally between fast-flowing channels and quiet, still pools.

🚨We're hiring! The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is seeking a tenure-track split position as Assistant Curator of Ichthyology and Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences. Please retweet & share with colleagues! 🐟🐠🧪 Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/174674

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🐟

The Univ. of Nebraska’s Dept. of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences has established a webpage soliciting the community’s help in saving their program. Their hearing in front of campus admin is next Friday, Oct 10th. Please consider sharing why they’re essential! eas.unl.edu/save-earth-a...

New preprint: Brawn before bite in endemic Asian mammals after the end-Cretaceous extinction. #Paleontology #Mammals #Extinction www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... TLDR: S. China mammals diversified dentally, tracked environment, then leveled up bite mechanics all within the first 10 m.y. post K-Pg.

Studying wrist and ankle bones for fossil id and found it amusing how carpals have wired names like magnum and unciform but tarsals have tired names like cuneiform 1, 2, 3. Like they ran out of cool names for bones by the time they got to feet 😆

Two new papers on fossil carnivorans. Old collections continue to offer new insights! @ucmpberkeley.bsky.social & IVPP Late Miocene immigrant carnivorans in California... www.vertpala.ac.cn/EN/10.19615/... Eco-functional divergence of Crocuta and Pachycrocuta... www.vertpala.ac.cn/EN/10.19615/...

New paper out today lead by @tsengzj.bsky.social where we test the 150-year-old hypothesis that the unique jaw torus in Nimravus is an adaptation to resist bite forces using FEA🦁🔪our results highlight some functional advantage of the torus, which are amplified at larger gape doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

The Department of Integrative Biology @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor of Human Anatomy! Open until September 19. Please share with anatomy/paleo/func-morph colleagues and friends. Happy to answer any questions. aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05053

New preprint with @tsengzj.bsky.social & @hlusko.bsky.social! Here, we developed the most comprehensive phenomic dataset of extant and extinct pan-carnivorans to test how Cenozoic climatic change influenced the evolution of the cranial, appendicular, & axial skeleton www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨New paper alert!🚨 We show that hummingbird beaks have changed in shape & size since around WWII, driven by the rise of commercialized feeders! 🧵 📄 Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb.... #ornithology #evolution #GlobalChangeBiology

Great day at the UW Undergraduate Research Symposium! Over the last two years, my mentees learned to develop hypotheses, collect data, code, and present results. All of this would not be possible without NSF support.

Read this w/ mixed feelings: the success of integrative approaches to studying evolution sped up the disappearance of disciplinary hires in areas such as paleo. UCMP’s 5 full time vert paleos now down to 2. Candidates w/ paleo training need to be centered in a more popular field to improve chances.

Our report on employment is out in Paleobiology (They did let us append that the paper was accepted before the election/changes to NSF and other granting agencies) Employment in paleontology: status and trends in the United States | Paleobiology | Cambridge Core - www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

TANK vs TESLA "We've crushed fascism before and we'll crush it again" - ⁠WW2 veteran Ken, 98, in the tank

Choose Science. Choose Europe. A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open. With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond. Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF

The Royal Ontario Museum is hiring a new collections manager! Please spread the word. Collections Specialist 2: Fossils (Vertebrate Paleontology) - Royal Ontario Museum - Careers t.co/CTtfs3MBMB

Scott Pelly of 60 Minutes says Paramount is interfering with their reporting on the Trump administration because they want Trump to approve a merger and that prompted the resignation of executive producer Bill Owen’s.

reminder that neil degrasse tyson is a creep www.vox.com/2019/7/29/89...

Thrilled to share my second PhD paper with @tomezard.bsky.social & @evoswami.bsky.social focused on the application of landmark-free geometric morphometrics! 🎉 Excited to contribute to advancing shape analysis techniques in biology. Check it out here: doi.org/10.1186/s128...

#WithoutNSF we would not have the means to both strengthen scientific ties with allies and understand & learn about our competitors during the formative early career stages of an American scientist. I did the former through DDIG and the latter through EAPSI, both now discontinued in my field.

For the last 3 yrs, I was the director for the Science of Science program at the NSF. We funded projects on science communication - science communication to the public, communication of public priorities to scientists, citizens engagement & participation in science. 🧵

We get to keep @narimanechatar.bsky.social here for two more years of mammal masticatory madness!!!

New 🦦 paper in @anatrecord.bsky.social! I quantified the growth curves of theoretical bite force & jaw musculature in sea otters. Newly weaned otters are at a disadvantage in foraging until the early stages of adulthood when they reach full skull & biting maturity doi.org/10.1002/ar.2...

Inside me there are two wolves. One of them has a 15 genome edits the other 20 genome edits. Neither of them is a dire wolf.

#FossilFriday Eocene coprolites from the Chocolate Mound locality, Jefferson County, Montana. Not to be confused with its extant counterparts in Washington D.C.

Christine M. Janis, Alberto Martín-Serra, Jessica M. Theodor & Craig S. Scott (2025) Down to earth: therian mammals became more terrestrial towards the end of the Cretaceous Palaeontology 68(2): e70004 doi: doi.org/10.1111/pala... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🌎 Join us for a full day of family-friendly activities celebrating our home planet at EarthFest—including Identification Stations for your discoveries! amnh.link/3G2vaUY

Our National Science Foundation funded work, led by @chrislaw.bsky.social, continues to decipher trade-offs in complex biological systems. These projects add new phenotypic data with which to understand how evolution works in the past, present, and future.

Had a blast presenting our work on carnivoran adaptive landscapes at #AnatomyConnected25! Read more here: academic.oup.com/iob/article/... #anatomy25 @tsengzj.bsky.social @hlusko.bsky.social

Excited to be part of this article in PNAS ably led by Alec Wilken and @crocholliday.bsky.social Holliday presenting results of our NSF grant on the interplay of brain expansion, jaw muscle reorientation, & cranial kinesis in bird evolution. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... bit.ly/3FxEYGC 📷: U Chicago

#FossilFriday teaching the @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social non-majors course on Mesozoic life with Jane the teenage T. rex this week, followed by a field trip to see the Wankel T. rex in front of @ucmpberkeley.bsky.social!

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Good evening from the UCMP! #CalBigGive starts now and goes until 9pm tomorrow! Until then, enjoy some images from past field trips. These field experiences allow students to gain deeper understanding of fossils and deep time in geologic context. To donate: give.berkeley.edu/fund/FU0961000

For #calbiggive we are sharing profiles of graduate students like PhD Candidate Emily Bogner who knew she wanted to be a scientist after watching Jurassic Park, “I thought it was so cool you could dig in the dirt and find remains from animals that are no longer alive.”  mvz.berkeley.edu/supportmvz/

For #calbiggive we are excited to share profiles of graduate students like PhD Candidate David Tian who says the best thing about working in the MVZ is, “the diversity of organisms, locations, and questions that MVZ members investigate.” To support the MVZ visit mvz.berkeley.edu/supportmvz/

Hey Bluesky! @sicb.bsky.social 's Divisions of Comparative Biomechanics and Vertebrate Morphology are here! We're here to share any position opportunities and keep you updated on DCB and DVM activities. Give us a follow and feel free to send any postings our way.