Gorgeous, colored up male Etheostoma caeruleum from the Huron River today. Picture credit: James Andrews.

Congrats to @reallyoldfish.bsky.social for passing his written and oral prelim exams and progressing to PhD candidacy!

This week’s Fossil Friday is a two-for-one! This Devonian slab contains the remains of both Gladiobranchus (an acanthodian or “spiny shark”) and Aserotaspis (an agnathan, or jawless fish). UALVP47080 from the U of A. #palaeontology #paleontology #fossils #fish #fossilfriday #alberta

This major fossil discovery is also an important milestone for home-grown Egyptian paleontology. Congrats to the Mansoura University team, including UMMP's Sanaa El-Sayed! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Can confirm.

UMMP specimen representing the oldest known larval crinoid arrives in time for #FossilFriday! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

cleveland baseball resumes tonight, and in this house, we celebrate the runs, long relief, and going going gone. go Guards. #GuardsBall

Update: the Stoplight Loosejaw model is now functional! Later on I'll paint it and give it teeth and gills, but for now I'm setting it aside to focus on other projects. This fish is quite small, with known specimens usually not growing over a foot long, so my model is about 3-4x life size.

There's no shortage of folks working in paleo who can trace their careers back to time spent as undergrads working with Bill Sanders in the UMMP prep lab. Learn more in the U-M alumni magazine: alumni.umich.edu/michigan-alu...

As the academic year winds down, continued excellence from the U-M Paleo Club graphics department (revealed to be @athenavohs.bsky.social).

🚨 New paper I had the honor to illustrate! 🚨 Guilherme Hermanson and Serjoscha W. Evers take a look at the survivors of the K-Pg event among the turtles and besides size note that especially diet is something that sets them apart: many of them very shell crusher! paper below:

New paper: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article... Guilherme & I investigate dietary selectivity on turtle K/Pg extinction - durophagous turtles have higher survivorship probability. Beautiful art by @joschuaknuppe.bsky.social

The new annual review from Kay Behrensmeyer has a killer Figure 3 depicting how different samples of the geologic record equates to different samples of stratigraphic time. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

First day of BIO 173 tours of the Research Museums Center in the books. Over the past five years, the RMC community has taken ~9,000 U-M undergrads behind the scenes in UMMP and our sibling museums. Sharing these collections is always a highlight for me.

Give a listen to my cousin Donna's podcast for the best regional sewer district!

The Burpee Museum, Rockford Illinois is hiring a Director of Collections and Research. They need a Ph.D. who is field, oriented, collaborative, can publish on their major fossil collections, generate grant money, & work with the public. App: burpee.org/director-of-... Dinosaurs & more galore.

A heartfelt thanks to all of you who supported UMMP on Giving Blueday earlier this week. Nearly 50 supporters combined for our biggest Giving Blueday ever! This generosity will allow us to provide more opportunities for undergraduates to work in our collections and labs.

My 2 favorite papers on this subject: M. Foote (1996): Models of morphological diversification. (book chapter in Evolutionary Paleobiology edited by Jablonski et al.) and @omearabrian.bsky.social et al. (2006). Testing for different rates of continuous trait evolution using likelihood. Evolution

Apart from amazing jaws, Malacosteus has large light organs that emit red light. It can also *see* red light (aided by a chlorophyll-derived photosensitizer), which is invisible to most deep-sea species. So Malacosteus has a built-in flashlight its prey cannot see. www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

Today is Giving Blueday, U-M's annual day of giving. Supporting undergrads training in our collections & labs is a priority for the Museum of Paleontology. A gift to the Edward P. Krasny Undergraduate Paleontology Lab and Collections Support Fund will help expand these opportunities: myumi.ch/MkXWb

Result from the Wadi al Hitan #paleostream! The "valley of the whales" as it is better known is a classic locality from the late Eocene of Egypt. Most famously it is place filled with the remains of early whales, Archaeoceti, but it's less straight forward as a piece than one...

Sneaky Saurichthys.

Working on a prototype for a Stoplight Loosejaw kinetic model! I wanted to test all the pivot points with paper before doing it with cardboard. This deep sea fish has one of the most unique and bizarre jaw arrangements, utilizing both the "true" jaw and the hyoid in its gape.

Polypterids (bichirs + ropefish) are the sister lineage of all other living ray-finned fishes. Restricted to Africa today, fragmentary fossils show they inhabited South America until at least the Paleocene. Now Late Cretaceous finds add Madagascar to the list: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🐟 Bony fish discovery‼️ During my class field (Paleontology & Society) trip this Pachyrhizodus caninus jaw of 11" (28 cm) was found. Upper Cretaceous (lower Campanian, ~82 Ma) Mooreville Chalk, central Alabama. Discovered by George Martin. University of Alabama Museums paleo coll. #FossilFriday!!

Happy #FossilFriday on this very lucky Friday the 13th. I might be just 1 or 2 weeks away from the first fieldwork of the year, and I promise not to smash any Bonnerichthys fins in the process!

Getting back into fish with these tetrapodomorphs: Tristichopterus, Eusthenopteron, Edenopteron, and Rhizodopsis #paleoart #sciart

🤓 New M.Sc. program: Earth System Dynamics & Evolution 🤓 fau-earth-system-science.github.io starting October 2026! PostDoc positions available

The rarest of the rare! This holy-grail dream fish is a larval-stage #monkfish, aka #goosefish. Shot in the wild, using scuba, while diving at night over water several thousand feet deep, several miles offshore from Kumejima, Okinawa. #larvalfish #blackwater #gug #deepseafish

A larval Macrourid sighting at 917 m! ROV pilots filmed future-fish during the #OBVI #LivingBioreactors expedition, supported @schmidtsciences.bsky.social.#OBVI#LivingBioreactorscientists are studying midwater organisms and how they sequester carbon.

📢 Including fossil tips in your phylogeny can double your continuous trait model fitting accuracy! Updated preprint out now on @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social. 🔗 doi.org/10.32942/X27... with @pedrolgodoy.bsky.social @macroecoevoale.bsky.social and @bethanyjallen.bsky.social

🌿 Postdoc opportunity in plant evolutionary ecology/genetics! My lab in the Dept. of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan is recruiting a postdoctoral researcher to start Fall 2026. We study plant adaptation, using weeds as model systems. #Postdoc #EcoEvo Pls RT!

Jack with an important thread on the uncertainty surrounding the roots of today's major ray-finned fish lineages, how to tackle it, and (most importantly) why it all matters.

Out now in Contributions from me and @gilespalaeo.bsky.social, a deep dive into an early member of the sturgeon and paddlefish lineage. Bear with me, but there’s a long backstory highlighting uncertainty about the anatomy of living species and how well-studied fossils can still yield new insights.

Results from the Flocking #paleostream! Megamastax, Ornitholestes, Tanyka and Eosteus

Flocking! Megamastax, Ornitholestes, Tanyka, Eosteus. #paleoart #paleostream #sciart #art

Taking some time to reflect on my progress as I inch closer to my qualifying exam. I think it’s been easy for me to connect to my study system when it is *literally* in my backyard. The fish I’m describing comes from the Birmingham Shale, which is close to the surface at my parents house

Osteichthyans--the bony fishes--are by far the most diverse group of living jawed vertebrates. Two papers out today in @nature.com feature remarkable new Chinese fossils that paint a picture of substantial morphological diversity among stem osteichthyans.

New paper out from @hoehna.bsky.social Lab, led by the brilliant @bjorntko.bsky.social! We applied the Pesto software (Kopperud & Höhna, 2025) to look at lineage-specific shifts in diversification rate on large, densely-sampled phylogenies across the Tree of Life doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Happy Birthday PALAEONAVIX - Bohemiacanthus was a great opener during the first two years of our enterprise www.palaeonavix.org/index.php/pa... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Skull (cast) of the Carboniferous embolomere Neopteroplax on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Paleo Club graphics team is batting 1.000.

The Evolutionary Morphology Research Group (EvoMoRG: www.evomorg.org) at the Department of Palaeontology of the University of Vienna seeks a motivated PhD student (University Praedoc Assistant) as soon as possible. For more information visit: jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Universi...

Newest neon addition to Liberty.

Tenure Track Assistant Professor and Curator of #Mollusca at the Natural History Museum Denmark, University of Copenhagen: employment.ku.dk/tenure-track...

UMMP is hiring: Administrative Assistant Senior position with primary duties related to administrative support, collections and publications compliance, and museum outreach and communications work. careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

new links between #GreatLakes winter storms & global climate patterns uncovered. Findings show how large-scale teleconnections shape storm temp, moisture & precip, key for improving seasonal forecasts: news.umich.edu/discovering-... by @abbathehut.bsky.social and other @UMich CIGLR researchers

Coming soon to a paleontology museum near you.

Had a chance to catch a temporary exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History featuring paleo-inspired art by Derek Hess. More info here: www.cmnh.org/explore/curr...