Today I spent the day at the @royalvetcollege.bsky.social looking at some crocodile forelimbs with @johnrhutchinson.bsky.social! Stay tuned for some exciting science and cool anatomy 🐊

Come join us! We have a one-year, part-time, education-focussed Assistant Professor post in Palaeobiology. Deadline for applications is 2nd June 2026. Please see more at the below link: edzz.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

#Primates move in very different ways, from swinging and climbing to walking on the ground or upright on two legs. Using detailed 3D musculoskeletal models of eight primates, we mapped how hind limb muscles generate leverage across a wide range of postures: doi.org/10.1098/rsos... #RSOS

Big day ahead. First live-animal studies I've done in our lab for a while. Alpacas moving through our gait lab including over soil, rough terrain and pressure pad. Lots of tech. Bio-inspired robot foot design with Dr. Sara Abad-Guaman from UCL. Hopefully some alpaca pics and video to come...

Posting my 3D dynamic Pteranodon folding wing membrane model again. I never got around to making a propatagium & uropatagium to go along with it, but this was still a useful proof of concept should I ever make a full animated pterosaur (which I fully plan on doing, eventually).

We are deeply saddened by the death of Alan Wilson. Our thoughts are with his family, friends, collaborators & colleagues 🧵1/3 www.biologists.com/stories/a-tr...

I've released version 1.2 of my SDF simulations! This update further improves the runtimes: - Simple checking for collision between two meshes run at >150 FPS - Full 6DOF ROM simulations optimising the translations for each rotational pose run at >5.6 FPS - Ligament path estimation run at >5.1 FPS

I had a great day yesterday at the @ucl-c4ia.bsky.social symposium Anatomy: past, present and future! There were some fantastic talks and I also got to presented my current work on bird flight

Congratulations to all of the remarkable ECRs whose research has been recognised in the 2025 JEB Outstanding Paper Prize shortlist Find out about each of the shortlisted papers and their outstanding ECR authors journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

My recent bird shoulder XROMM study got nominated and shortlisted for the @jexpbiol.bsky.social Outstanding Paper Prize! Unfortunately, I did not win but very happy to have been considered!! If you want to learn more about our study see below thread!

Haolong dongi, amazing new spiny (yes,really) iguanodontian from early cretaceous china #sciart

Version 1.1 of my SDF simulations are out! This update significantly improves the runtime of all simulations while making the installation a lot easier! ROM simulations used to take days, now they only take a few hours and include physiological accurate soft tissue constraints!

New President of the @royalsociety.org is going to tackle exorbitant UK visa fees for scientists. We sure need a big change! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Joints aren’t just bones 🦴 Ligaments shape how vertebrates move New study by @oliverdemuth.bsky.social et al in @jexpbiol.bsky.social combines in silico & ex vivo #XROMM of the partridge shoulder to show how ligaments constrain motion 🐦 👉 journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

The final PDF of our XROMM study on bird shoulders w/ @johnrhutchinson.bsky.social & @fieldpalaeo.bsky.social is now available at @jexpbiol.bsky.social!

🚨 Palaeo jobs alert!! 🚨 Two(!!) postdoc positions available in Cambridge! 1. Human Evolutionary Anatomy: cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc... 2. Evolutionary Biomechanics: cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc... As part of the @erc.europa.eu funded STEPS project!

🚨 Job position @cam.ac.uk 🚨 Project Coordinator for 5 years at 0.5 FTE on the ERC Funded STEPS project. Closing date for application 2nd January 2026, interviews ~3 weeks later! Apply here: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/project... @cam-archaeology.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu

A-level English, voluntary work, delayed citizenship: it’s Labour’s Orwellian Two Minutes Hate for immigrants | Nesrine Malik

Happy to share my first postdoc work published in @funecology.bsky.social ! A huge thank-you to @oliverdemuth.bsky.social @lizzysteell.bsky.social @fieldpalaeo.bsky.social @grumpydrfabre.bsky.social and to @snsf.ch besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Last week our in press manuscript was made available at @jexpbiol.bsky.social with the typeset version following soon. We conducted ex vivo XROMM experiments to determine the joint mobility in Red legged partridges and compared them with in silico simulations: doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

We are delighted to share that Dr Ashleigh Wiseman has been awarded an @erc.europa.eu Starter Grant for her project STEPS: Biomechanical simulations of hominin locomotion across complex terrains. 👉 www.arch.cam.ac.uk/news/ashleig... #ERCStG

Very proud of the amazing Dr. Ashleigh Wiseman! Securing an @erc.europa.eu starting grant is a huge achievement! Keep your eyes open for PostDoc opportunities in her new research group at @cam-archaeology.bsky.social @cam.ac.uk!!

I'm recruiting a PhD student to join the lab at @gtsciences.bsky.social in Fall 2026! Broad taxonomic and topical freedom under the umbrella of vertebrate joint form and function. Information here: www.manafzadeh.com – please share 🦴🩻

🚨 Hiring! We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher with expertise in computational fluid dynamics and structural simulations to investigate biomechanics and mechanosensory feedback in insect flight. Extreme agility ✔️ Morphological computing ✔️ Meshes! ✔️ jobs.rvc.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

Interesting study, however, every scientist should stay as far away as possible from #generativeAI! It is literally just making things up with little to no control over the output. No morphology, soft tissues nor anything else can be "reconstructed" or "augmented" with genAI.

Sauropods dared to ask the radical question: "What if dinosaurs were really, really big?" I will post an ID chart later, but if anyone wants to guess, then feel free to sound off in the comments. 🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕

In the 1960s Switzerland had some of Europe's filthiest waterbodies. Now its cities boast near-pristine rivers & lakes: "We are united by a love of water". Lessons to learn here, about building emotional connection to water as well as infrastructure investment. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

I finally got this working. Pro & uropatagium to follow. Side note, while I'm aware of hypotheses about actinofibril function, I'm not a fan of the trope of pterosaur wing membranes shrinking to almost nothing when grounded rather than just being allowed to fold, even a little bit.

EEVEE tests 🦖

'Dino Birds' airs on @pbs.org in N. America tomorrow (9pm, 5th Feb.). Follow research from our lab and colleagues around the world revealing the origin of birds. Hope you enjoy it! www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vi... @stevebrusatte.bsky.social @gnavalon.bsky.social @ksepkalab.bsky.social

Amazing successful day here in Morocco setting up a prep lab with our collaborators at USMBA. We even managed to start prepping some new Spicomellus material! Big, big thanks to @afossilpreparator.bsky.social and Kate @Zoic Palaeotech! Impossible without their hard work! @richardjbutler.bsky.social

Whaddaya think of this bones I got

For #FossilFriday, here's some #paleoart of a casual afternoon in the Early Cretaceous Wealden group, with iguanodonts, tyrannosauroids, polacanthids and sauropods making a mess of a watering hole. The mashed-up muds left by these animals can be found to this day in Wealden rocks. #dinosaurs #sciart

An older piece - an immature male American Redstart preening, showcasing how these young males spend about a year looking like females, except for patchy black speckling that comes in at about a year of age. 🎨🪶 #SciArt #BirdArt

Diplodocus. Ink on Arches hot pressed, 263 × 105 mm. One of my ten infostation illustrations for the new exhibition which opened last week at the Natural History Museum UZH Read more about the mounting adventures of 'HQ1' the Diplodocus in @dennish.bsky.social's #NMZChronicles!

The calls for #2025SVP symposia, field trip and workshop proposals are now live. Please consider proposing and get in contact if there's anything the local host committee can do to support! vertpaleo.org/call-for-202... vertpaleo.org/call-for-202...

Got to see the latest Squirrel-raptor at The Field Museum. Its exquisite preparation was done by Connie Van Beek and Akiko Shinya. Here’s Connie working on a more recent bird from the Green River Fm., a similar type of slab fossil, just ~90degrees of Eocene longitude away and ~90million yrs later.

There have been lots of amazing advances in palaeornithology over the last few years. In this invited review we discuss recent discoveries bearing on the origin of the bird brain, shoulder, palate, and air-filled skeleton. Check it out open access here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

I love seeing skeletons actually doing something. Most often skeletons in #museums are just shown standing straight on four legs, but here we have pigeons in flight, jerboas jumping, a flying squirrel and sloth climbing, and a cheetah sprinting, at Paris' National Museum of Natural History.

Daniel J. Field, M. Grace Burton, Juan Benito, Olivia Plateau and Guillermo Navalón (2025) Whence the birds: 200 years of dinosaurs, avian antecedents Biology Letters 21(1): 20240500 doi: doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

This is officially my horizontally longest image to date, depicting some of the earliest complex animals on the planet from 565 to 505 million years ago and how they changed over time. Thank you to @egmitchell.bsky.social and Steve Pates for trusting me with this gargantuan task! #Art #SciArt

I finally managed to sucessfully implement batch processing of several Maya files (parallelised onto multiple CPU cores)! Finishing the reanalyses for one of my yet to be published PhD chapters is getting closer and closer!

📣 Come work with us! Three year Research Associate position to work as part of Leverhulme Trust funded project collecting and studying amazing Jurassic mammal fossils from the Isle of Skye. PhD not necessary; CT segmentation skills essential. Contact me for details: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DLK473/r...

When did our ancestors start to run? New musculoskeletal simulations of Lucy indicate that she was capable of running! Read the dispatch by Ashleigh Wiseman out in @currentbiology.bsky.social today: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... and the paper by Bates et al. here: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

This is very discouraging behaviour from Elsevier, and in the very last footnote even highlights that AI formatting software instituted in 2023 has been altering the meaning of texts published by the journal. Unacceptable.

Resignation of the Journal of Human Evolution Editorial Board: We are saddened to announce the resignations of The Joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor. Press release below.

Quick trip to Zurich to visit family and also a chance to see the new natural history museum (NMZ) of the UZH! #FossilFriday

Linked to this: we will be hiring soon a three-year research assistant. PhD not necessary but needs fossil CT segmentation skills and willing to work in the lab and field. Send me a message if of interest!

Earlier this week saw the opening of new anthropological exhibition displays in our museum - including this amazing double-whammy of Lucy the skeleton & Lucy the reconstruction; walking poses to match the Laetoli footprints on this #FossilFriday 🐡