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 🧪

Excited to share our new paper where we find that the rise, decline and fall of clades is not explained by the usual suspects (diversity-dependence, ecological opportunities) but rather by species' insidious loss of macroevolutionary fitness: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/3

🦎THREAD: We just published something wild in @asn-amnat.bsky.social - lizards missing entire limbs not only survive, but some appear to actually thrive in the wild?! Let me tell you about the "three-legged pirate" lizards 🏴‍☠️ [Paper: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... ] (1/n)

Out now in Biology Letters, my latest paper tackles an apparently simple question: how many characters are needed to reconstruct a phylogeny? TL;DR: in most cases between 100 and 500, more than a substantial portion of morphological datasets, but the story is more complex... doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

Our opinion piece on the importance of science and vertebrate paleontology in the United States was just published by Open Access Government: www.openaccessgovernment.org/the-importan... #svp #svppresident

Our latest paper, now how to conciliate apparently discrepant evolutionary rate patterns in squamates, but which may well apply to any study system with Stephanie Pierce and @7brumas.bsky.social #macroevolution academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

🐍🦎 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!

Do you need a good paleo podcast to start your weekend? 🤔 In this interview with Science Moab, NHMU's Randy Irmis, Curator of Paleontology, discusses his research on the Chinle Formation located in southern Utah. Listen here! ➡️ sciencemoab.org/utahs-chinle...

🙌🙌

Physical traits, habitat, and geological processes are primary factors influencing the completeness of lizard, snake, and mosasaur fossils, shaping our understanding of reptile evolution. doi.org/g94m65

It’s finally out! Extremely pleased to share the last chapter of my dissertation to be published! In this study, we take a deep dive into the 242 million-year squamate 🦎🐍 fossil record to quantify factors that lead to the mostly fragmentary specimens in collections today: doi.org/10.1017/pab....

UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Attention students: the deadline for our fall collections study award coming up soon! Use the funds to come out and use our LACM specimens for your research.

Dinosaurs as ecosystem engineers! Weaver, L.N., Tobin, T.S., Sprain, C.J. et al. Dinosaur extinction can explain continental facies shifts at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Commun Earth Environ 6, 712 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s432...

Diverging trends in erythrocyte size elucidate cardiovascular evolution in stem #dinosaurs and #crocodilians #ProcB #Palaeobiology #Evolution royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

To celebrate a momentous 10 Years of #DinoFest, we’re looking back at a decade of discoveries from the Mesozoic—the period from about 252 to 66 million years ago, when dinosaurs evolved and then came to rule the planet: go.nhm.org/dinofest10 🦖 Will you be joining us this Sunday, September 14?

Devon knows how they made it so teeny: the fossil of a very small rhynchocephalian from the Triassic of Devon, UK, is the oldest known lepidosaur and sheds light on the early history of this important and species-rich tetrapod group. @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Love how being sprawling-legged ectotherms does absolutely nothing to stop lizards from sometimes doing this:

Some 40 million years ago, northern Europe was covered by what is known as the Baltic Amber Forest, now known only from pieces of amber found on the coastline. An illustration from my recent article in the magazine Suomen Luonto, based on research by Dr. Eva-Maria Sadowski. cara.app/post/6e6ed80...

🦖 Sunday, September 14, join us as we celebrate our 10th Annual #DinoFest! Peek into the prehistoric past of dinosaurs, hear from world-renowned paleontologists, see unique Cretaceous era fossil collections, Special Screenings, and more: nhm.org/dinofest

October 1 deadline for @nhm.org Student Collections Study Award. Get some $$ 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... 🧪

It's been online for a month but now in final format: a new paper I'm on is out today! We analyzed over 200 features from the bird wing and shoulder girdle skeleton to see how they're distributed across the bird family tree. academic.oup.com/iob/advance-... 🪶🧪 (📷 @fieldpalaeo.bsky.social)

New killer croc from the end of the Cretaceous in Patagonia: dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

It’s finally out! Our work addressing the origins of reptiles is published in PCJ! peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10.... We use novel info gleaned from the scan data of dozens of stem reptiles to substantially revise our understanding of early reptile evolution #paleontology #herpetology

Microbial mats in dinosaur ichnocoenoses - Noffke - Sedimentology - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🌱 BHL’s Call for Support soft-closes on Aug 31. 🧪 With @clirnews.bsky.social as our new fiscal sponsor, we now have an administrative & financial home, but we still need partners, hosts, funders & long-term investment to secure BHL's future. about.biodiversitylibrary.org/call-for-sup... #ILoveBHL

Important read by @thomsanger.bsky.social for anyone in science. academic.oup.com/icb/advance-...