An animated graphic showing wingbeats of different birds. This one is so beautiful. Image: Eleanor Lutz tabletopwhale.com/2014/09/29/f...

Good thread about thinking about audiences when giving a talk.

Happy to end the year sharing my thoughts on this paper: "Body size and litter size as predictors of pouch presence in marsupials", by Casali et al. (2025). Digest available at doi.org/10.1093/evol...

When we think of marsupials, the first thing that comes to mind is the presence of a pouch. But despite this striking anatomical feature, not all marsupials have it. What factors determine its presence or absence?

How to use and interpret the #adaptationinertia framework of #phylogenetic comparative methods based on the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process to study adaptation: doi.org/10.1093/jeb/... Pienaar et al. 2025

Very well done, timely, and complete report published by @universitypress.cambridge.org about the future of academic publishing. I had the opportunity to be interviewed for it and I highly recommend everyone to read it. Important messages here www.cambridge.org/gb/universit...

Loss of macroevolutionary species fitness explains the rise and fall of clades 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🐀

About 120 million years ago, a pterosaur fell from the sky and died in a pond. A layer of sediment washed over it, preserving not only its skeleton, but also its stomach. The resulting fossil is the first pterosaur ever found with a belly full of plants. #NationalFossilDay https://scim.ag/4hbaedc

It's crazy to think that while heading toward 9 billion people on Earth, we ere still undescribed (and know nothing about) hundreds to maybe thousand mammalian species academic.oup.com/jmammal/adva... "projections of ∼7,079 species by 2030 and ∼8,376 by 2050 if these trends continue" 🧪 #Macroecology

Your regular reminder: Please do not call bad-acting humans "rats." This is slander against rats.

Introducing BIRDBASE, which aims to be the world's most comprehensive avian trait ecology database. Article links to open access paper, & data in Excel spreadsheet. phys.org/news/2025-09... #science #environment #ecology #eco #biology #bird #birds #birding #birdwatching #openaccess #datascience

Ever run `install.packages()` and wish it were faster, smarter, and more reliable? The {pak} package speeds things up with parallel downloads, dependency solving, and reproducible installs. 📦 pak.r-lib.org #RStats

Featuring several mentions of this excellent paper www.cell.com/trends/ecolo... by our colleague Ronald Jenner.

As we're all taught, you can (usually) only directly date the age of a rock if it cooled from lava. But here, scientists have dated dinosaur eggs, using uranium-lead ratios in the calcite. Hugely exciting, maybe groundbreaking. My take @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...

Some 241 million years ago in what is now England, a tiny, lizardlike creature had teeth well suited for snapping after insects. Now named Agriodontosaurus helsbypetrae, this extinct reptile may be the oldest of its kind ever found. https://scim.ag/3V75MC5

Water anoles take a bubble of air down when they submerge, which they breathe like a tiny scuba tank, and now @lindseyswierk.bsky.social & co reveal that the reptiles may also be using the bubble like a gill, to breathe oxygen directly from the water journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Thumbs are cool and all, but have you ever thought about how important thumbnails are? They just might have been the key to rodents' evolutionary success. That and more of the best from @science.org and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪

Jokes on you, that's his treadmill

Me too! 😂

Our paper on rodent thumbnails is out! Big team effort, powered by museum collections. Turns out, nails can reveal a lot about rodent evolution. Shoutout to Dr. Gordon Shepherd for the wild idea to study rodents thumbs!