🎓 Member News! 🌟 We’re excited to announce a brand-new series of Early-Career Researcher webinars all about careers and grants 💼💡 Our ERC Officer will be joined by inspiring grant awardees and professionals from diverse career paths who’ll share their experiences, tips, [1/2]

Yes, indeed -- the scaling issue is certainly important. If the proxies for the same variable scale differently, it means we have a problem, either one or both underestimates or overestimates 'fluctuations' or 'trend' magnitudes.

This illustration from a classic, reminds us, that we need all three approaches to the ancient worlds: Palæontography - the description of past life forms Palæobiology - purely biological theoretical outlook Palæontology - a holistic study of the past, combining different fields. 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio

Every day we learn on how AI screws ever more things in the practice of science. Now, on the arXiv in the computer science category, they only accept the peer reviewed post-prints of review papers. blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a... 🧪

Landscapes of Iceland is essentially Mars if it had Earthly liquid water, the same atmosphere and life. 🧪 ⚒️ #Geology

Congratulations Sergi and Co, excellent work! Bretskyan hierarchy in spirit work on the spatial structures of innovation. Look at this revealing thread on the new study about the spatial patterns of human innovation👇 🧪 #Complexity

If you need a professional terrestrial phototroph you need a symbiont of plant+fungi. Lichen (Spongiophyton sp) colonized the land already at least in the Early Devonian: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology

Eva sends best regards from her kindergarten!

Historical reflection by a legendary biometrician, morphometrists, and statistician F. James Rohlf on the emergence of mathematization of the classification and systematics during his life time. academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan... 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio

From the depths of the Wikipedia on the character of Paul Dirac: "Dirac was known among his colleagues for his precise and taciturn nature. His colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined a unit called a "dirac", which was one word per hour." What's your apparent flow in "diracs"?

The story of extinctions and population depletions in the late Quaternary is a complex one. Climate and humans interference in shaping diversity is always convoluted. Here is the story from the Australian lizards' point of view 👇 www.cell.com/current-biol... 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #Macroecology

Perfect cover for the bovide paleobiology volume. Stasys Eidrigevičius "Heads", in the 'Stasys' Museum, Panevėžys.

Wow, this is crazy. Direct megafaunal connections between Europe and North America existed up to the Miocene! Imagine island hopping and strait-crossing rhinos in the Arctic: 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Orca sized lamniform sharks from the Aptian of Australia: "Our results show that mega-body size is an ancient lamniform trait, with the Australian cardabiodontid being around 6–8 m and over 3 tons."

This also totally fails to account for different fields having different norms. In astronomy, the last author slot is meaningless (and is almost certainly someone who didn’t contribute all that much). 🔭🧪

New rules for a rat-race. I my opinion, all this micro-accounting (= internal author struggles), inhibits effective collaboration. Science increasingly turns to a goal-oriented bureaucracy, away from an open art-like exploration, curiosity and thruth-seeking. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Very proud of this paper in BioScience : « Too cute to be wild: what teddy bears reveal about our disconnection from nature » 🧸 are more than toys, they shape among our first emotional connections to nature. But their design may also distort how we see wildlife ! 👉 doi.org/10.1093/bios... 🧪🦤

Postdoc Opportunity - Interested in plant scaling, quantitative botany, or theoretical plant biology? join our group to explore how plant form, function & scaling principles connect across levels of organization www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons-postdoctoral-fellowships-in-plant-biology🧪🌾🌐

Excited to be in Valencia this week for my annual master’s seminar at the Master’s Degree in Bioinformatics, coinciding with the publication of our new book chapter based on course notes. Thanks to @julipereto.bsky.social for the ongoing collaboration! 📚 link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Glad to announce that at our department we will have yet another post-doc — Misha Whittingham @deathandtaxa.bsky.social . His theme of research will be "An exploration of community assembly mechanisms, paleobiogeography, and evolutionary dynamics in Silurian graptolites (Hemichordata)".

Sometimes the best model is much more data. High resolution pre-extinction Cretaceous dinosaur megafaunas were thriving. Until very unlucky event happened. 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology

Giant ground sloths had unique food preferences: "DMTA of Paramylodon harlani ... and Nothrotheriops shastensis ... suggests that P. harlani consumed significantly harderfoods (e.g. tubers, roots, seeds, fruit pits) than N. shastensis." royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.... 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio

Joseph Botting (& his partner Lucy Muir) discovered the Castle Bank Biota (middle Ordovician, Wales), which shows exceptional preservation of very small animals. Wonderfully knowledgeable people. See for yourself.

Enigmatic animals from the Cambrian -- the Chancelloriids Sponges, slugs, something else entirely? www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWNX... 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology

Continental arcs a factor in the Cambrian Explosion: subduction-driven...accelerated erosion of phosphorus-rich juvenile rocks, releasing nutrients that boosted marine productivity and subsequent oxygen buildup through organic burial www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology

Glad to announce that at our department of Geology and Mineralogy at Vilnius University we will have a new post-doc—Jason Pardo @jdpardo.bsky.social, who will work on applying the Bretskyan hierarchy paradigm in understanding "The Roles of Space and Time in Palaeozoic Vertebrate Community Assembly"

2025, as declared by the Seimas, is the Year of Baroque Literature and Matthaeus Casimirus Sarbievius in Lithuania. This is the virtual exhibition of the Wroblewski Library in Vilnius, entitled “I draw the beauty of your great world, o Christ”: eparodos.mab.lt/s/-tavo-pasa...

Congratulations with the publication Ignacio! I need to read it asap. "We call this hypotheses the 'Zarathustran hypothesis', following Nietzsche’s idea that the maintenance of life does not merely follow from conservation..." 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology #Macroecology

ON the AI Habsburghization of rare languages by the means uncritical translation 🧪

These are Otolithes of the Miocene small cod species Gadiculus labiatus.

Again, the theme of toxicity of environments in shaping macroevolution, gains momentus. This time in the hominid evolution! 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology

What do you see here? How versatile paleontologist you are? 😅 The answer to the quiz will be given after 12 hours. 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio

Glad to see the "Chicago rat hole" (rodent-body imprint) of January 2024 Internet fame was studied more, but just to add my $0.02: Many folks missed the tracks leading away from the body imprint, meaning the squirrel (not rat) fell & splatted in wet concrete, but then walked it off. 🧪🐿️🐾

Sorry today to hear about the death of Drew Struzan. He was probably the artist that was most globally well-known without most people knowing his name. He invented an entire style of art, which just like the movies themselves, borrowed from everywhere and became part of our whole culture.

Steve Wroe discusses the evidence for the giant Pleistocene lions across all continents except Australia and Antarctica. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB-s...

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

Cool to discover the new living fossils. One example is Hula painted frog www.nature.com/articles/nco... , which is endemic to one lake in Israel and it diverge from sister in the Paleogene. Apparently a new (extinct) species is found in Pleistocene of Italy. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 🧪 ⚒️

Australia is fundamentally biogeographically-macroevolutionarily perturbed system. Many native species will go extinct, invasive species will stay -- you won't unscramble what is already mixed, and after some time a new species will emerge which will form a new equilibrium in a new context. 🧪 ⚒️

For #Croctober Day 11 we got Confractosuchus (art by Julius Csotonyi) Confracto once inhabited the Winton Formation of Australia, but unlike the tiny Isisfordia was sizable enough to even feed on dinosaurs. Which we know because we found the bones of an elasmarian in its stomach

A very interesting and clever study which explores how change is distributed between anagenesis and cladogenesis (gradual vs punctuational change) in the light of brain-body size allometry in modern primates. 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Macroecology academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...

"...regional extinction rate of between 75 and 84% for squamates in the Western Interior of North America and suggests this group was more severely impacted across the K/Pg boundary than other small-bodied vertebrates." royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology

Cool, McArthur genius award goes to the Lithuanian expat Ieva Jusionytė. She studies "entanglements between the contemporary state and various modes of violence and wounding." www.lrt.lt/lituanica/ak...

Interesting use of lithium isotopes to test for habitat specialization in Miguasha vertebrates. Notably, the authors find evidence for marine occupancy for tetrapodamorphs Eusthenopteron and Elpistostege, compared to freshwater occupancy in other common taxa. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Interesting study by Norbert and co about the determination of coherent spatio-temporal structures ("atmospheric rivers") in ephemeral realm of the atmosphere. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... 🧪 ⚒️ #Complexity #Atmosphere

The Innovation Game: How Arcade Genres Evolve, Imitate, and Collapse www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20... @blaividiella.bsky.social @andrejpaleo.bsky.social

Great to see Sergi's blog post about the recent study on the macroevolutionary dynamics of arcade games. doi.org/10.1017/ehs.... 🧪 ⚒️ #Complexity #EvoBio

Extinct Pleistocene carnivores were diurnal and had high metabolic rates: "Only basal metabolic rate and diurnality are robust predictors of extinction, even after accounting for phylogenetic and trait uncertainty" nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec... 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #Macroecology

New in #PhilTransB - a theme issue exploring one of science’s deepest questions: how life can emerge from non-living matter. Edited by @ricardsole.bsky.social and colleagues. Read: buff.ly/7iz4tGu

Interesting: "Warming altered abundance scaling with size depending on richness; in high-richness communities, temperature favored small protists, steepening the CCSR slope" On Ka scales there were systemic shifts in size-abundance distribution during extinction event www.geology.cz/bulletin/ful...