My fellow naturalists, I figured out how to break google AI.

Early draft of our new Tylosaurus miniskull. Lots of little changes to make but this is easier for me to make edits on rather than pointing to a computer screen

SHARE SHARE SHARE youtu.be/ms5DzHgDbN4?...

Phylogenetics is one of the fundamental building blocks of paleontology, but it is arguably the most esoteric and least accessible of them. Confusion over and reproducibility of methods is one major source (1/5) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I dunno man, a 62-foot-long octopus seems hard to imagine. Curious to see what the discourse around this one will be.

Been thinking marine-reptiley thoughts today. Here's one of my latest #paleoart efforts along that line: Tylosaurus proriger. The colour is based on fossil colour data, although it's far from certain that this animal was black and countershaded. Print link: www.markwitton.co.uk/product-page...

i love seeing monitor lizards swim yesssss go my brave mosasaur cousins you're doing them proud!! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0nO...

There were awards for climate science and plenty in the life sciences. There were a bunch in artificial intelligence but not an absurd number. I would say this is the best news in the federal grants space in the past year.

Hi! I'm not here very often, but I just launched my brand new lab website! I'm also hiring a !!! three-year !!! Postdoc. Interest form link can be found under "The Team" section. (Current domain name is temporary haha. FormorphologyLab dot com coming soon!) badger-mustard-h5jf.squarespace.com

Thinkin about Chuckwallas today. Their main defense strategy is to squeeze into cracks in rocks and then inflate themselves so predators can’t pull them out 📷Polly Conrad

Out today in Antarctic Science: a description of the first vertebrate assemblage from the middle member of the Triassic Fremouw Formation of Antarctica. New occurrences of Procolophoonidae and Prolacerta, as well as updated paleoenvironmental interpretations! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Decoupled phenotypic constraints framed by respiratory adaptation in the rise of land vertebrates | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Geophysicists say there is an increased risks of destructive floods and wild fires due to climate change. A guy who thinks he was teleported to a Waffle House says there's nothing to worry about. For busy Americans, it can be hard to know who to trust.

I am shocked to see this language from the NSF. “The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”

tl;dr: NIH is running at about 60% of pre-Trump levels and NSF is running at about 20% of pre-Trump levels of funding-outlays (some directorates far below even that). Utterly catastrophic. An unforced disaster for U.S. society, and the world

This is so, so well-articulated.

What is going to make university degrees worthless isn’t niche subjects like languages or the entire human past, it’s charging to teach people “content-creator” skills they can learn on the can

Always repost outstanding lizards. A+ walking lichens 🦎

Allow me to introduce you to Sonselasuchus cedrus, a new bipedal, beaked and herbivorous crocodile-relative that lived during the Late Triassic in North America #paleoart #sciart

And as you think about whether our collections could support your research, a (somewhat incomplete) list of taxa in the Ento collection is here- but if you don’t see a group you’re interested in, please email us! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Undergrad and graduate students! Could your work benefit from visiting one of the NHMLAC’s collections? Apply for our Collections Study Award, due Apr. 1. I’d love to have students make use of our Entomology collection! Details here: tinyurl.com/bdduefsy

April 1 deadline for @nhm.org Student Collections Study Award. Get $$ to spend time collecting data in our collections, including @tarpits.org Open to: - current undergraduate and grad students - *not* local to Los Angeles (international applicants welcome) More: nhm.org/student-coll...

Seven years of my life were spent preparing this animal!

the #openaccess paper can be found here! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Happy International Women's Day 💐 Did you know, for every 7 men in palaeontology, there are ~3 women. Women make up 25-35% of global vertebrate palaeontological publishing output. And are most likely to study mammals, while men, reptiles.

🦖 Free Webinar: 200 Years of Vertebrate Paleontology in South Asia Join Dr. Advait Jukar for a fascinating look at the history and future of vertebrate paleontology in South Asia. 📅 March 11 | 12-1 PM ET 🔗 Register: anatomy.org/ANATOMY/Meet...

This is really interesting. There is evidence for strong natural selection on titin (striated muscle elastic component) in snakes and other Squamata/Toxicofera -- especially in wide-gaped snakes. Which makes sense biomechanically. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Please enjoy the single most amazing quote from a paleontologist I have ever read: “The animal literally cemented itself—and its nether regions—into eternal history like the movie stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.” 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-...

An analysis in Nature Ecology & Evolution surveys community palaeontological databases, documenting their contributions to science as well as their vulnerabilities, and provide recommendations for the future of open science databases. go.nature.com/3ZwTeGl #Paleosky 🧪

Lizards in chain mail: reconstructing the enigmatic past of dermal armour in squamate reptiles url: academic.oup.com/biolinnean/a...

The first chapter of my PhD is published! If you're interested in how bones can be buried in floods, check it out in Paleobiology! (doi:10.1017/pab.2025.10087) And if you want to see the full scale experiments we ran, I did a summary video featuring a cover of When the Levee Breaks! #Taphonomy

Crane, A.H., Benito, J., Chen, A. et al. Mandibular morphology clarifies phylogenetic relationships near the origin of crown birds. BMC Ecol Evo (2025). doi.org/10.1186/s128...

rewriting a more realistic script for The Lord of the Rings. Frodo just stays home and we watch thirteen hours of him cooking meals and reading books. every hour or so he glances at a newspaper and goes, "Oh shit what's happening in Rohan? That's fucked." Then he goes to the pub to drink with Sam.

They’re stealing from us. They are stealing from us and we have to put a stop to this. This cannot stand.

NCAR is foundational scientific infrastructure. This is escalating the assault on climate science, and there is a direct line between this step and the loss of many human lives.

It is hard to overstate how critical @ncar-ucar.bsky.social is to climate science in the US and around the world. It's the beating heart of our field. Generations of scientists have trained there, and almost everyone I know relies on deep collaborations with NCAR scientists. It's end is unthinkable.

Here’s the thing, emerging scientists aren’t going to flee to do science elsewhere…they just won’t do the science. We will lose at least one, if not two generations of knowledge if we don’t get this shit sorted out immediately.

Presented here is this year’s entire See Jurassic Right Back To School series where I chat with TWELVE scientists and science communicators about all the cool shit they do and all their freaky, fun, and fascinating hyperfixations you need to know about, right now: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

👑 Return of the Short (Tyrant) King! With the help of our 𝘛. 𝘳𝘦𝘹 growth series, researchers show throat bones accurately record maturity in dinosaurs, establishing 𝘕𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘺𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘶𝘴 as a distinct species—𝙣𝙤𝙩 a juvenile 𝘛. 𝘳𝘦𝘹: go.nhm.org/nanotyrannus

Evidence for the loss of pneumatization and pneumosteal tissues in secondarily aquatic archosaurs url: academic.oup.com/iob/article/...

It’s Antarctica Day! Give it up for this articulated skeleton of Thrinaxodon, an early mammal relative from 250 million years ago, found in the Transantarctic Mountains 8 years ago. This continent has an amazing fossil heritage that we’re continuing to learn more about!

In an era marked by rapid climate change and biodiversity loss, it is imperative that we continue to invest in the unique value of natural history collections data "Global sampling decline erodes science potential of natural history collections" 🧪

GenAI has polluted image search results, especially for animal pics. It’s now basically impossible to find accurate art references. Enter this: a repository of open-access, AI-free images of wild & exotic taxa. Artists creating *without AI* have blanket permission for derivative/transformative use.

New paper alert! (My first!) This is a benchmark paper on all NPS fossils within the State of Utah through 2024. Loads of illustrations by me and pic by coauthors and collaborators. Open access, free to download! Thanks to all who made this possible! giw.utahgeology.org/giw/index.ph...

New paper alert!! Thanks to @tuttran.bsky.social for putting us all together for his first publication! It will be helpful to have much of this data in one place. Check it out: giw.utahgeology.org/giw/index.ph... #NPSpaleo

Squamate optic nerves are having a week #2025SVP IYKYK

I’ve released a tool to sketch and edit phylogenetic trees! yawak.jp/PhyloWeaver/ Load a Newick file and intuitively add/remove/resize branches. Useful for quick conceptual trees, extracting subtrees, or turning ideas into Newick.

This is a "reindeer cyclone", a defensive behavior that has been observed in herds of reindeer, even in captivity. The fawns and older animals are at the center, the strongest animal in the outer lanes. The point is to confuse the brains of predators accustomed to stalking a single outlier.

My latest for @nytimes.com! For 40 years, paleontologists have grappled over whether a small tyrannosaur — named Nanotyrannus — was its own animal, or simply a teenage T.rex. The debate has been ... contentious. Which is why it's so fun to finally be able to say this: Folks? Nanotyrannus is real.

Thinking back to the spring with the cutest little Tylosaurus skull I've seen in the past few years. Just look at that stubby little rostrum (no shade, he's trying his best) Based on strat location in the Niobrara, it's probably a juvenile T. kansasensis. Can't wait to see this one get prepped 🧪