Last of the walgvogels...

If you created any artwork based on our recent study on Diplodocus color patterns, we would love to see it!!! Please feel free to reply to this with your colorful dippy art 🦕🖌️🎨

extremely realistic basilosaurus reconstruction

NEW paper out today in Royal Society Open Science: “Fossilized melanosomes reveal colour patterning of a sauropod dinosaur” (2025). 🦕 Research conducted in part & facilitated by Elevation Science. Art by Tess Gallagher. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

Super cool stuff!! Tess has put a massive amount of work into this project, and the end result is really incredible. Certainly worth a read, and major congrats to @tessasaurus.bsky.social and the rest of the team!

While the paper hasn't come out just yet, the news certainly has. Proud to announce our discovery of color patterning in a sauropod dinosaur. Will go in depth tomorrow.

I just bet you have questions about #PrehistoricPlanetIceAge, right? Reddit is doing an AMA on the series tomorrow, in which I'm joined by my excellent colleagues Dorothy Ballarini and Russell Dodgson from @Framestore See you there! www.reddit.com/r/movies/com...

Hey Ben, The museum is its own separately funded unit, so while this hurts, and directly affects our curators and interns from EAS, UNSM including Ashfall and Trailside remains open and active. That said, we are gutted. EAS have been allies and partners with the museum for a hundred years. No more.

It's over. Despite the fact that the academic council recommended against it, despite the fact that the program brought in more tuition than it cost, and despite the fact that Nebraskans need & deserve this expertise, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences will be cut. www.dailynebraskan.com/news/adminis...

Microsyops fur brush demo. Quick one. Brushes now available here villes.gumroad.com/l/rkrac

At a forest clearing, you're greeted by the guardian, the wise old man of the forest, Gigantopithecus blacki. Recent commission of the big guy, inspired by #prehistoricplaneticeage. Although this guy is a Pongine-->

Plotopterid (extinct flightless relative of boobies and cormorants) tarsometatarsus (foot bone) from the Yamaga Formation (Oligocene of Japan): www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/prps... 🪶🧪 (📷Mori)

From all the paleoart and media depictions, one would think Nanotyrannus’s only interaction with the rest of the ecosystem was to harass juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex. Ecologically specialized to be a schoolyard bully

New research on a hot topic - histology of the holotype supports Nanotyrannus as distinct from T. rex. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

While birds and bats both developed adaptations for flight, the way they went about it is so fundamentally different it affects their possible ecological adaptation. Specifically, birds can easily shift to a walking lifestyle, bats can't. 🧪 Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for people who put their data on Morphosource.

OK, soooo at some point in the future we'll start talking about the animals and sequences that were considered for #PrehistoricPlanetIceAge but didn't make it over all the hurdles. We're talking giant lemurs, deinotheres, paranthropines, additional cats, zygomaturines and more.

Yes, there was a deliberate push to get rid of all scientific names; of course, I think this is a massive mistake. And, indeed, no roaring for sabretooths, their hyoid anatomy indicates that they couldn't do it :) #PrehistoricPlanetIceAge

Last year I made a Xiphactinus pecan pie for Thanksgiving. What prehistoric fish should I do this year?

Go my Bothriolepis... This year's fish pecan pie! Bothriolepis was a peculiar-looking placoderm from the Devonian period or the Paleozoic. It had two long pointed pectoral fins and silly little eyes on top of its head. #fossil #fish #paleontology #bothriolepis

Dinosaurs were nearly wiped out 66 million years ago, long before the start of the Quaternary ice age. However, #PrehistoricPlanetIceAge shows that the few surviving dinosaurs (birds) would go on to become highly successful. Let's meet the ice age dinosaurs featured in the series! 🪶🧪

Bucket list sloth butt selfie!! This beautiful specimen is from Anza Borrego and it has THOUSANDS of in situ osteoderms. There are only two specimens with in situ osteoderms (that I know of) in North America and I’m spending the day with this one.

EVERYBODY DANCE NOW

”Bloody Mary” Nanotyrannus #sciart

“Non-functional,” oil on wood panel. This is the last of the paintings I worked on this summer. It felt nice to let social media take a back seat for a while so I could focus on art without any added pressure. #painting #pigeonsky #art

Brother Barley (Neurotrichus gibbsii) and Brother Rye (Blarina brevicauda)

Happy #FossilFriday! In October, UNSM doubled our holdings of an unusual extinct species, Dasypus bellus, which literally translates to “beautiful armadillo.”✨ It was about twice the size of the modern nine-banded armadillo. These specimens are from 12-25 thousand years ago.🦴 #fossils #paleontology

with apologies to Mr Watterson

The deadline for submitting abstracts & workshop proposals for the 2026 AMMP meeting is Sunday Nov 23rd. The 2026 meeting is hosted by the North Dakota Geological Survey in Bismark, ND. Our symposium will be: Defining “Best Practices”. paleomethods.org/Symposium paleomethods.org/Annual-Meeting

Now that SVP is over, I can finally post the commission that I did for @mosasaurologist.bsky.social 's poster on a certain very cool taxon! #paleoart #sciart

Making some fresh models to sharpen my 3D skills, and what better subject to do that than our lovely brazilian Pleistocene megafauna? #SciArt #artbyjulio

Mammoth spotted in South Poland! Actually, a to-scale model by Studio Kamyk for the Jegiellonian University Nature Education Centre, Krakow. 😍

A little sad that I couldn't join my notochord-oriented paleontological colleagues in Birmingham U.K. this week at #2025SVP, but heartened to see so many people enjoying the meeting & exchanging the latest revealed knowledge about vertebrate fossils & evolution. 🧪🦴🪨⚒️

A pair of American Mastodon chow down on a (slightly fantastical) pumpkin patch 🍂✨️ #sciart #paleoart

Are you attending #2025SVP #SVP2025? Come see my talk on Thursday at 2pm in the Synapsida technical session on tail length evolution in across stem mammals, and find out why this long-neglected part of the skeleton has a much more complicated story to tell than we previously thought!

While going through ptero collections with @zhejiang0pterus.bsky.social we have rediscovered the missing holotype of Ornithocheirus huxleyi Seeley, 1870 in the collections of the British Geological Survey @bgs.ac.uk

Our paper on tinamou evolution is finally out in @systbiol.bsky.social. academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

Foggy morning in Late Pleistocene Patagonia. #Art #SciArt #artbyjulio

Phylogeny of tinamous based on whole-genomes and fossils: academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan... 🪶🧪 (📷Musher et al.)

Today we described three new toad species that give birth to fully formed toadlets, from the Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania! 🇹🇿🧪🐸 vertebrate-zoology.arphahub.com/article/1670...

Nice way to start the day: www.italianjournalofgeosciences.it/297/article-...

🦣 The Mastodon giganteus of North America /. Boston: J. Wilson, 1852.. [Source]

🐭 The red-nosed mouse (Wiedomys pyrrhorhinos) has a tongue built for versatility—4 papilla types & strong musculature suit its omnivorous diet. Tongue morphology mirrors close relatives hinting at evolutionarily conserved design Barros Torres et al anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

😍 www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i0R...

As I argue in #PlatypusMatters, Australia has the world's best mammals, but is sadly the worst place on Earth to be a mammal, with the planet's worst #extinction rate. The Christmas Island shrew is now the latest species to be officially declared extinct. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Some photos from my last walk through the Field's Africa hall, which closed forever last week to make way for a new version. 🧵

MorphoBank is upgrading! Logins will be disabled from Oct 17 (5 PM PDT) – Oct 20, 2025 while we migrate to new software. Published projects will remain available. Thanks for your patience as we make MorphoBank better for the research community. 💪 #MorphoBank #OpenScience #DataCuration #improvement

At long last, Beth Zaiken’s spectacular He’ll Creek mural is permanently installed in the Sue gallery!

So this AMNH Andrewsarchus display from the 60s is sick as hell, allowing for the outdated reconstruction and all that.

Sloth World, Part 1! There are a LOT of sloths, let's look at some recent developments... tetzoo.com/blog/2025/10... #mammals #fossils #xenarthrans