"Climate is not just background. Geography is not static. Evolution is not random drift. These are linked processes operating over immense spans of time."

For decades, scientists argued about whether warming or cooling drives new species. The fossil record was holding the answer all along. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/jKZCdIN

The cover-up just never ends. Rest in peace, Ruben Ray Martinez.

#WeekendReading: Wang et al., on magnesium isotopes and how they work in carbonate minerals (notably the role of flow regime in setting the rate limits). 🧪⚒️ Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Extinction isn’t random. Range size matters. Temperature tolerance matters. Climate change matters. But there’s another piece we’ve long suspected: geography. For 500 million years, the shape of continents helped shape survival. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/rPvvUEM

It sure does!

Happy Birthday Darwin! 🧪

We know dinosaurs reached the Arctic. But did they stay year-round… or just migrate? The answer came from something tiny: newborn fossils. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/H62Y5Wh

Oops I accidentally spent three hours making a powerpoint presentation on phylogenetics and legless gecko diversity/appreciation. Look at how cute Aprasia inaurita is! 📷 Nick Volpe @nvolpe.bsky.social

Could dinosaurs raise their young at the poles? For decades, migration seemed like the answer. But tiny Arctic fossils tell a different story buff.ly/bLhO1l6 🧪 #SciComm

We know what killed the dinosaurs. We know where it hit. But here’s the question we almost never ask: When, within the year, did the asteroid strike? New evidence suggests it was spring. And in biology, timing can be everything. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/xoqrhxI

Development of lizards before the egg is laid. Very useful!

"A spring impact would have struck Northern Hemisphere ecosystems at a moment of heightened biological sensitivity, when many organisms were investing heavily in reproduction and growth"

"Like tree rings, fish bones grow in cycles. Growth slows or stops during unfavorable conditions and accelerates when food becomes abundant. These changes leave distinct markers that can be read under the microscope and corroborated with chemical signals linked to feeding."

The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs didn’t just hit Earth. It hit in spring. That timing helps explain who survived and who didn’t. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/4YOP2x3

By mastering the complex physics of orbital flight, Eileen Collins became the first woman to pilot a NASA space shuttle on mission STS-63, proving that precision, training, and courage are as vital to space exploration as rocket fuel. Would you go to space if you could? 🚀 #Space #NASA #WomeninSTEM

I’ve gotta chew on this one for a bit.

If cooling caused the Late Ordovician extinction, the crash should have been smooth. It wasn’t. Something else broke the system. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/kM4MoPe

For a long time, the Cambrian explosion sounded like a clean success story. Life appears. Complexity rises. End of story. But around 513 million years ago, Earth’s first mass extinction quietly disrupted that narrative. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/T57hhdM

What if Earth’s climate wasn’t controlled by one dominant process… but by a balance we’ve been underestimating for a long time? 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/eyzvncM

Deep time doesn’t give us comfort stories. It shows how life moves forward through loss, recovery, and narrow windows of opportunity. Some survived. Others didn’t. And that difference still matters today. 🧪 #SciComm Find the Full Story here: buff.ly/aNKR13G

There’s a strange silence in our evolutionary history. DNA says our ancestors should be there. The rocks say otherwise. What happened 445 million years ago? 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/4oclRRu

From my favorite children’s (and not-so-children’s!) illustrator. That he lives in Barcelona says so much about what the world is seeing

Has Mediterranean weather always been this unstable? Tree rings going back 500 years offer a rare long view on climate change and rainfall extremes. The past turns out to be very instructive. Subscribe for more! 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/6HRyGrR

“The exciting part is learning how linked the Earth system is, and how one change can unlock several others.”

We thought the first climate mass extinction was simple: an ice age wiped life out. Then we noticed something that doesn’t fit: it happened in two pulses. So what delivered those two blows? Subscribe for more! 🧪 #SciComm

Evolution doesn’t always move forward. Sometimes it stops, resets, and rebuilds. A 445-million-year-old extinction changed the course of vertebrate life, and we’re only now seeing how. Subscribe for more! 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/4VdZk0K

Human evolution felt simple… until Flores. What ended the Hobbit wasn’t size, or humans, or catastrophe. It was something quieter. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/0asFZG7

Why did the “Hobbit” of Flores disappear? Humans, climate, or something else? A new study adds clues about water, seasons, and survival on a small island. Subscribe for more stories where fossils and climate meet! 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/fUmeIAs

During an ancient heatwave, forests didn’t collapse. They adapted. And that adaptation quietly broke Earth’s natural cooling system. Here’s what the fossil record reveals 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/yZ818Ah

We keep asking: Is life common in the universe? The problem is simple and uncomfortable: we have only one data point. From fossils to exoplanets, Earth shapes what we can say and what we can’t. Subscribe for more! 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/vzZlVaL

Cold didn’t kill mammoths. They thrived in it. 🦣 So why did one of the most successful Ice Age animals disappear? Subscribe to the Climate Ages Newsletter for more stories where paleontology and climate meet! buff.ly/NAOakGJ 🧪 #SciComm

Climate change isn't just a story of the carbon cycle, other elemental budgets are also affected and interact. The nitrogen cycle is also affected by elevated CO2 concentrations, warming, and altered precipitation regimes. 🧪 Link: www.maxapress.com/article/doi/...

🧪Keep an eye on the sky in 2026! David and I are two astrophysicists and have put together a big list of astro events to watch in 2026, including eclipses, elongations, and meteor showers. Mark your calendars! (or check out our PDF space calendar in the description!) www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZdn...

Astrophysics as taught by three! 😊👶🏼👶🏼 Let’s goooooo! 🔭🧪🎢

When Earth warmed rapidly 56 million years ago, plants didn’t disappear. But their ability to store carbon weakened for a very long time. Survival and stability are not the same thing. #SciComm 🧪 buff.ly/0UIRJnb

🦣 ❄️ Cold never bothered them anyway! 🧪

Cold didn’t kill mammoths. It shaped a world that worked in their favor. Ice Age grasslands, genetic adaptations, and even their blood helped mammoths thrive for hundreds of thousands of years… until that world disappeared. 🧪 #SciComm #Paleontology buff.ly/NXkKpV8

What an honor! Thanks @revkin.bsky.social 🧪 #SciComm

Why did turtles survive the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs? 🐢☄️ Hint: It wasn't luck. When the environment crashes, specialization is a trap. The winners of the next epoch were the ones who could eat anything and hide anywhere. Here is what the past teaches us about resilience 🧪 #SciComm 🧵

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid darkened the sky and collapsed food webs worldwide Non-avian dinosaurs went extinct, but some birds, mammals, turtles, and fish survived Why? It wasn’t luck It was biology Join the Newsletter for more like this! 🧪 #SciComm #Paleontology buff.ly/GfPnPW3

We still live in an Ice Age. Not a frozen planet, but a long rhythm of ice advance and retreat that began 2.6 million years ago. The calm climate we know is an interglacial pause. Past changes unfolded over thousands of years. Join the newsletter for more! 🧪 #SciComm #Climate buff.ly/jMS0hrP

Coral reefs have survived ice ages and sea-level swings. But once, they stopped growing for 3,000 years... and then recovered. New research shows why that pause mattered… and what it means for reefs facing rapid change today. 🧪 #SciComm

We tend to picture dinosaurs emerging from lush, temperate worlds. New research suggests their story may have begun somewhere very different: hot, dry tropical Gondwana: deserts, not forests. Sometimes origins hide where we least expect them. 🧪 #SciComm #Paleontology

Oxygen feels essential to life. But when it first spread across Earth, it nearly wiped life out. For billions of years, organisms survived without it... until a slow chemical shift rewrote the rules. Oxygen didn’t start life. It almost ended it. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/pn0A04F

A 35,000-year-old saber-toothed cub emerged from melting permafrost... whiskers intact. Incredible science. But the reason we’re finding more of these animals isn’t better fieldwork. It’s a warming Arctic slowly unlocking carbon we were never meant to release. 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/BNAouHY

Life didn’t begin in an oxygen-rich world. And when oxygen finally appeared, it nearly wiped life out. So, how did a gas we depend on today almost end life billions of years ago? Join our newsletter to find out more! 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/6HGEub2

Four billion years ago, Earth had oceans and solid ground. Yet clear evidence of life doesn’t appear until about 3.8 billion years ago. Why the gap? Join the Newsletter for more! 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/Bv9y2gQ

Earth formed, cooled, and had oceans early on. But clear evidence of life doesn’t appear until about 3.8 billion years ago. Why the gap? #Paleontology Subscribe for more stories like this! 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/rHHldXb

Earth’s age wasn’t solved with satellites or lasers. It was figured out first with rocks, fossils, notebooks, and maps… long before anyone knew the number. How geologists built a reliable timeline before they had a clock Join the Newsletter for more! 🧪 #SciComm buff.ly/iS3KVYM