Instead of having a phylogenetics editor, which *could* have potential to be gatekeepy, IMO a better strategy to improve the 'reproducibility crisis' in vertebrate paleo would be to have workshops at SVP meetings to learn more about quantitative phylogenetic methods, data science, & reproducibility

One question is, if one were to apply a similar test to non-vertpaleo phylogenetic analyses, do you expect similar problems? Would Journal of Paleo find something similar? I fear that many phylogenetic analyses are not reproducible.

Octopus are host to wide variety of parasites. Including tapeworms, dailyparasite.blogspot.com/2022/10/proc... dicyemid parasites that dwell in their kidneys, dailyparasite.blogspot.com/2024/12/dicy... and apicomplexans that aggregate in their guts dailyparasite.blogspot.com/2022/04/aggr... 🧪

🐞 Six major naming puzzles for American leaf beetles have been resolved. 🕵️‍♂️ The study also uncovers the true identity of the mysterious 1838 author "Demay," providing a rare biography and portrait of the scientist now known as Dr. Aloysius François De Mey: doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1278.175201

Librarians who insist LLMs can *never* be useful for *anyone* & anyone claiming so is deluded are really comparable to flat earthers. Even skeptics like Gary Marcus & Margaret Marshall - one of the authors of thestochastic parrot paper is on record for saying LLMs can be extremely useful. (1)

The problem is not that older faculty are sticking around - it’s that they are not being replaced. The argument of this piece is quite pernicious as it substitutes a class war btw workers and a neoliberal administration w an age war btw different ranks of workers

I took the time to write a cogent response and assurance AI is not used for moderation and was called a liar. Just for the record, that ends the conversation, in case they later post "and then I was ignored".

People claim that psychedelics have been used by Indigenous groups around the world for millennia. But clear evidence of serotonergic psychedelic use has long been confined to the Americas. Until now. Here, we document clear evidence of Indigenous psilocybin use in Lesotho. 🍄 osf.io/preprints/so...

Vote for Aotearoa New Zealand’s Fungus of the Year 2026! We have launched the annual vote for #NZ's favourite fungus: interactives.landcareresearch.co.nz/foty/ 🧪 #fungi #mycology

CIPRES is shutting down at the end of June: www.phylo.org . It's been such a good resource for the phylogenetics community. Thanks to #NSF and Simons for funding it and for all the people who have worked to grow and sustain this for so long.

eDNA is possibly the coolest application! Below: read-level placement across a pan-vertebrate mitochondrial pangenome (left) where a clear cluster of read assignments supports the presence of many mammoth reads (right). Processing ~9 billion reads took just 8 minutes!

🤖 The Orbitoscope is a new open-source robot that creates detailed 3D models of insects without ever having to touch or move the specimen. 📷 This system rotates the camera instead of the insect and allows incredibly accurate measurements. ➡️ Learn more: doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1277.177740

Maybe journals aren’t the root cause of problems in academia just a symptom…

Bit sad to no longer be running the bot that forwarded EvolDir emails to Bluesky (and before that, Twitter), but at the same time relieved that @eseb.bsky.social has taken over responsibility for that task. If you are into evolution in any way, follow @evoldir.bsky.social for conferences, jobs, etc.

📣 EvolDir is now managed by @eseb.bsky.social! We are delighted to be taking the reins and express our gratitude to both Brian Golding who began this service to the community in the mid-1980s and to @rdmpage.bsky.social who ran this account until now 👏 You can now find evoldir here: evoldir.net

Latest displacement activity is playing with an idea for showing the Open Tree of Life opentreeoflife.github.io using summary trees and animated transitions (with some help from Claude Code and OpenAI) #opentreeoflife #phylogeny

How do scientists use biodiversity literature? At #BHLDay2026, Lauren Hughes, Principal Curator In Charge @nhm-london.bsky.social, will explore how BHL is the bridge between taxonomy @marinespecies.bsky.social & the evidence behind it. 📅 29 April: London + online 🎟️ Register now: bit.ly/bhlday2026

"Why funders shouldn’t withdraw money from open access publishing" www.samuelmoore.org/2026/04/14/w... by @samuelmoore.org

Inspired by an old Flickr post code.flickr.net/author/flick... I built a tool to display a polygon around DNA barcode localities in the @boldsystems.bsky.social database. For example, here is Switzerland bold-view-bf2dfe9b0db3.herokuapp.com/geo.php?coun... as outlined by DNA barcodes.

Finally bit the bullet and re-created my eBird account after it was somehow set to perma-private mode yrs ago, but of course the data migration is a HUGE pain. For one, the eBird data download table doesn't match the import format, so I need 3rd party software (Scythebill!) to reformat everything

DNA:ta ilmassa! “Viruses, bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, birds, fish … the intestinal parasites of moose... whatever was out there and had a reference to match it, we could see — every single organism that is not extremely rare in the ecosystem” www.nature.com/articles/d41... #eDNA

I'm trying to get Claude Code to code in a more "LibraryThing" style, so I had it do an extensive review of the current style, honed over 20 years. This is exactly right, and (IMHO) good advice for every coder.

Rather remarkably, my search of the web yielded only one good image of what was once one of the most important things in science

This is why the statement below's so important. Let's try to avoid those missteps this time, not succumb to fantasy economics and wishful thinking, be smart about funding infrastructure, and consider which parts of the ecosystem should be non-profit vs commercial 3/3 bsky.app/profile/rich...

This bumper special issue was an absolute joy to co-edit. Get stuck in!

I'm pretty sure I know which month is correct for the above label, but still:

#FunFact The scientists recreated snail teeth using 3D printing to test how different designs affect feeding performance. 3/3

JOB: Machine Learning Engineer at Cambridge Digital Humanities for interesting (fixed term) project with CAMPOP www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/about/news/n...

You don't want to miss the upcoming webinar series hosted by @bgbol.org kicking off on 23 April ⬇️ 💡

How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism: merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...

well these are cute 🥲 www.theguardian.com/environment/...

#Science #publishing is changing fast - AI, open data, reviewer fatigue. 🥳🎂 Our #OA #journal One Ecosystem @oneecosystem.pensoft.net marks 10 years by doubling down on quality, transparency & innovation. 👇See the full editorial here: doi.org/10.3897/onee... #ecology #sciencepublishing

The programmers we can't afford, who build the 80% solutions that fall short for everyone, don't use what they build and don't feel the need to improve it.

Towards the end of this interview, Clive Thomson points to the coming boom in software customization. It's true that we have forever been ill-served by systems that we can't create for ourselves, nor afford to hire programmers to make for us.

What should @biodivlibrary.bsky.social BHL be doing next (or better)? In a few days there will be a "stakeholders" meeting where people (incl. me) sit in a room and say what they think BHL should do. But most users won't be in that room. If you are here and have thoughts re BHL, pls let me know.

Sequencing all complex life in the UK & Ireland could add up to £3bn to the economy over 30 years, a new report finds. Explore the impact of the Darwin Tree of Life Project ⤵️ https://www.sanger.ac.uk/news_item/unlocking-the-value-of-biodiversity-in-the-uk-and-ireland/

A new version of the ROR registry has been released! 🎉 As always, new and modified records are immediately available in the ROR API, and the latest data can be downloaded from Zenodo at doi.org/10.5281/zeno.... Read what's new in release v2.6. github.com/ror-communit...

Here they are (Zygothrica sp) going at it to defend their mushroom kingdom. El Refugio, Intag, Ecuador

Hey @opencitations.bsky.social I think there's an issue with how citations are counted for @gbif.org datasets. GBIF reports 7,225 citations for doi.org/10.15468/ab3..., whereas you report 759,361 (two orders of magnitude higher) sparql.opencitations.net/index?query=...

Teeny-tiny wasp willies It's a specialist interest, I have to admit, but what's the deal hymenopterists - why the reluctance to dissect? Read more: ajcarthropoda.blogspot.com/2026/04/teen... #Wasps #Hymenoptera #Entomology #Insects

PhD-position ALERT! 🧪🪲 🧬 Interested in studying the genomics of local adaptation and niche breadth using long-term experimental evolution? Come join me and @gmkov.bsky.social at @animecol-uu.bsky.social, Uppsala Univ. Read more and apply here: uu.varbi.com/en/what:job/... Deadline 22nd of May!

A dawn chorus from the tropical rainforest of Kutini-Payamu (Iron Range), Cape York. Bonus points for identifying some of the diagnostic sounds in this one that could only be heard only in this region of Australia! 🔍 #wildoz #fieldrecording #soundscape #bioacoustics

there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men

Gardenwise, the magazine of Singapore Botanic Gardens - a new bumper issue has gone online. Tributes to Dr Chew Wee-Lek (1932–2026) and Ruth Kiew (1946–2025), plus - Digitisation - Ethnobotany in Singapore's desserts - Botanical Art - SBG Archives www.nparks.gov.sg/sbg/research...

2 PhD Opportunities! 🤩 We are recruiting two highly motivated PhD students to join an ambitious project advancing Robotic Paleontology—a rapidly emerging field that fuses paleontology, biomechanics, simulation, and robotics. nyakaturalab.com/news/ Please share!!

Position of interest for plant evolutionary biologists: two assistant professorships are now open in the System Earth Science (SES) department at Maastricht University! Interested? See the details here, or visit the QR code: vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Venlo-As...

The 'eyelashes' on a southern ground hornbill would make a model envious, but here's a neat trick: Those AREN'T eyelash hairs. They're modified FEATHERS. Let's take a look at these specialized structures & why the southern ground hornbill (Bucorvus leadbeateri) needs these long velvet veils.

From the "joys of PDF" file, here is the result of copying and pasting a fairly common used word in taxonomic papers. Hඈඅඈඍඒඉൾ Anyone care to guess the actual word is? This is from a recent, born-digital PDF.

We are happy to release DuckLake v1.0, a production-ready lakehouse format specification. Its reference implementation, the ducklake DuckDB extension, is available as of today in DuckDB v1.5.2. For more details, read the announcement blog post: ducklake.select/2026/04/13/d...