Calling Midwest Anatomists and Paleontologists! Deadlines Extended! Sept 1st for Talks and Posters! Sept 12th for registration. Look forward to seeing you here! @anatomyorg.bsky.social @paleosoc.bsky.social @societyofvertpaleo.bsky.social www.anatomy.org/.../Meetings...

Congratulations to Emma Cooney on graduating with a MS out of the lab. Stay tuned for some wicked cranial morphology.

Happy to meet new people and share our work on imaging and informatics at @bionexuskc.bsky.social in Kansas City.

Good times with good people at AAA this week!

Congratulations to our 2025 Class of Fellows! They were recognized at the Fellows reception tonight and received their AAA Fellows pin!🫀🧠 #Anatomy25 #anatomy #education #research #science #aaa #portlandoregon #scientificmeeting #annualmeeting

This project has started a long time ago, but in a galaxy not too far away… Happy to share this new study with @taphonomist.bsky.social looking at the functional morphology and biomechanics of the Rancor. Warning! Nerdy sci fi, palaeo & biomechanics thread following! jgeekstudies.org/2025/03/08/i...

New paper out today! Here we examine how a simple behaviour, head scratching, has evolved in birds. There are some relatively complex changes going on that vary across clades, as demonstrated by @gallinaciega.bsky.social analyses. www.frontiersin.org/journals/eth... #birds #ornithology #evolution 🪶

If you’re hanging out at the 5th Palaelontolgical Virtual Congress, and you like crocs (or even not!) visit my talk here and join the comments! www.palaeovc.org/6/great-tran...

Accompanying our recent paper documenting evolutionary changes in jaw muscles along the line to birds, is a collection of models on Sketchfab illustrating 3D resultant vectors of jaw muscles along with skulls and a few different ways of visualizing data like these. (www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Happy to share this new paper! We explored the relationships of head shape and feeding mechanics in dinosaurs. A cascade of changes from big brains, to reoriented muscles, to a breakdown of linkages resulted in avian powered kinesis, but not until neognathes. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Movers and shakers in the lab: Chris, Aryan, Corrine, John, Cerise and whiteboard.

My Obituary of Elisabeth Vrba—out today in Nature in read-only format: rdcu.be/ediyO

Catch my talk at #5thPVC! Thanks for the invite! Psst… it’s on croc heads.

Lab had a great time at the Columbia Young Scientist Expo. Constant parade of families keen on discovery.

Hey folks!!! Come join us at Mizzou this October for a Paleo-Themed @anatomyorg.bsky.social Regional Meeting: PALEO CONNECTED. Sponsored in part by @paleosoc.bsky.social, we're looking forward to having you all. Watch this space.

Who says birds don’t have teeth?

We’re cleaning some lab spaces to make way for impending construction. Found an entiantiornithine fossil high up on a shelf with some other skeletons. New taxon methinks.

SICB is back! Please follow the society's new BlueSky account: @sicb.bsky.social SICB recognizes that the scientific enterprise is only successful because of the people performing that science. Without those people, science and all of the political and economic strength that it provides, stops.

Got to see the latest Squirrel-raptor at The Field Museum. Its exquisite preparation was done by Connie Van Beek and Akiko Shinya. Here’s Connie working on a more recent bird from the Green River Fm., a similar type of slab fossil, just ~90degrees of Eocene longitude away and ~90million yrs later.

Got to visit the Field Museum Friday. Got my picture with Geology Collections Manager Bill Simpson. Bill helped get me started in this grand adventure in Paleo. I’m forever grateful to him and all the rest of the Sue prep team, who still let me hang in the lab when I show up with my own students.

I am very proud of the work that went into this new Sanger Lab publication. This paper was led by postdoc Marta Marchini and a number of my lab's undergraduate students, each of which contributed unique skills or effort to the completion of this project.

Best lab photo ever

Getting hyped for #SICB2025. We'll have a talk and a poster on Pangolin tongues as part of the Hydrostats symposium. Get ready for a multimedia pangopalooza!

Meet PhD student Chris Zobek, thanks to @nocturnetwork.bsky.social! Chris has been busy visualizing and measuring the diversity of jaw muscles in snakes. Really cool stuff. nocturnetwork.org/blog/nocturn...

Birds are frightening! Ichthyornis AMNH FARB 32773.

Which faculty member had a party whose house featured this piece of art on the wall? A. Dentist B. Anthropologist C. Ag Sciences D. Victorian Literature E. Anatomist

Check out last year's paper with Emily Lessner getting at knowing your beak nerve anatomy before trimming your parrot's beak! avmajournals.avma.org/view/journal...

New paper out! Some crazy folks decided to run a 3D imaging and computational biology class during Covid quarantine. Out of it came a nice little observer variation paper on how we landmark, segment and analyze 3D musculoskeletal features in CT data of Anoles. Thanks all! 🧪 doi.org/10.1093/iob/...

Big week coming up at the 2024 Anatomy Connected meeting in Toronto starting this weekend. Come catch a bunch of talks and posters from the lab as well as our symposium on Visualizing the Scale of Skeletal Muscles.

Happy Valentine's day. Have an iodine-scanned heart from a consented human donor in our GOB program. Check out all those muscle fascicles! 🧪

Itty bitty teenie weenie pale yellow polkadot phytosaur chin from MNA. #Fossilfriday

Bluesky don't Gif?

There's still time to join us at NAPC 2024 in Ann Arbor. Abstracts are due Feb 15! sites.lsa.umich.edu/napc2024/pre...

Enjoy a sample of the animals we've been working on this week.

All you functional morphology and evolutionary biomechanics people! Considering going to NAPC 2024 in Ann Arbor MI this June???? Alec Wilken and I will be running an Evolutionary Biomechanics symposium! Join us! Microbes! Plants! Invertebrates! Vertebrates! Everything in between!

PhD student Chris Zobek ever so carefully posing a fresh, dead rattlesnake head for fixation and diceCT and later 3D muscley goodness, alongside a few other fanged friends.

Had a great time at SVP Cincinnati. 1st time back since 2018 in ABQ! We spoke of mandibles, kinesis, display structures, dinosaurs, crocs, and epiphyses. We schemed and celebrated. I have become an academic grandfather, congrats to Henry Tsai and his student Drew Collett. 🐊🦖🦜💪💀

I don’t think I have any Missouri peeps here yet but: Hey! Come to Prehistoric Pints tomorrow night at Logboat Brewery, Columbia Missouri. Chat up our local paleontologists! Catch a few talks in Cambrian reefs and T. rex mechanics! Beer!

Having a hard time sleeping? Catch this talk of mine at @NHMU’s Dinofest2023 about Dinosaur Jaw Muscles and Cranial Biomechanics. Thanks for having me folks! you're some of my favorite people with some of the greatest fossils! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW7JPYsioWw&t=699s

You’ll never go into social media again.