Did you know sponges are among the oldest animals on Earth? They're over half a billion years old! New research has helped to narrow down when they first evolved - and it could reveal more about the first ever animals! Find out more about these marine marvels 👇 www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...

Homology?

Sponges are notoriously difficult to understand in evolutionary biology terms. I think this paper is a big step forward : www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Early sponges lacked [mineralised] skeletons. New paper led by M. Eleonora Rossi. Great to have contributed alongside colleagues from @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social , @nhm-london.bsky.social and @mncn-csic.bsky.social. Read it here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Earliest Cenozoic ammonoids: Machalski, M., Olszewska-Nejbert, D., Landman, N.H. et al. Ammonite survival across the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary confirmed by new data from Denmark. Sci Rep 15, 45802 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

A bizzare christmas display of some total-group birds.

Excited to be at the @thepalass.bsky.social Annual Meeting in Portsmouth! I’m speaking tomorrow in Session 1 (10:15) on “Big Birds, Big Data: Palaeognath Phylogeny Tested Using Morphology, DNA & Ancient Collagen.” Coauthored with Ed Moody, Andrew Kitchener & Mike Buckley.

OPal is recruiting! We are looking for a Managing Editor and 2* Steering Committee members. Apply if you want to shape the future of open-access palaeo. Please share widely!

Please consider supporting this petition to save the Centre for Palaeobiology and Biosphere Evolution at the University of Leicester. Leicester palaeontologists have made huge contributions to the field, including identifying the first Ediacaran fossils and the conodont animal! tinyurl.com/t3zesk88

Thread on today's paper, which is 3/4 from my dissertation on the evolution of fishes and using morphological data for phylogenetic analyses. Come with me, on a journey on phylogenetics and fishes. anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

Found the end of the rainbow. Its on the M5 just north of Exeter.

PalAss abstract accepted! Here's a cheeky spoiler...

Living sharks have innumerable tiny scales, but their earliest relatives somehow grew larger bony plates. In our new Biology Letters @royalsocietypublishing.org, we work try and out how, arguing they grew by fusing and remodelling spines and scales. doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

Incredibly proud and also very emotional to see this new paper published in @systbiol.bsky.social. The study was lead by Pierre Cockx, who sadly passed away in July. academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

Decay experiments on shrimps provide insight into the fossilisation potential of arthropod appendages www.openpalaeo.org/article/view... 🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐 Out now in @openpalaeo.bsky.social

A phylogeny for Heterostraci (stem-gnathostomes) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... @datadryad @wileyearthspace @fossilrob.bsky.social @evopalaeo.bsky.social

A phylogeny for Heterostraci onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... Very pleased to see this out, and huge thanks to Emma Randle for leading the study and @fossilrob.bsky.social for pushing it through the finish line.

Come and visit @thepalass.bsky.social at the Lyme Regis fossil festival. See if you can beat the odds and become a fossil!

Just added some new functions to treesurgeon github.com/evo-palaeo/t...

[email protected] has published its first research paper! Publish your research here too! Its totally completely FREE! There are NO publication costs and NO access costs. www.openpalaeo.org/article/view...

Foxy enjoying the evening ☀️in Bristol

Super interesting paper outlining the damaging impact of the 'Gollum effect': researchers who restrict access to resources. Very relevant to palaeo work regarding the gatekeeping of collection material and the harm this causes to science. Worth a read! www.cell.com/one-earth/fu...

Victory for wild camping at the Supreme Court! The verdict is a relief– but Dartmoor remains the *only* place in England & Wales where the public has a right to wild camp Labour must now pass a new right to roam act to defend & extend the public’s access rights www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Congrats to Yara and team! They reveal that Anatolepis - previously interpreted as the oldest vertebrate with a mineralised skeleton - is not a vertebrate at all! Paper here: tinyurl.com/59sdw7x9 and a nice write up by @guillaumehouee.bsky.social & Philippe Janvier here: tinyurl.com/2u6haac8

Any young paleo workers will be hard pressed to find a better opportunity than this.

Dinosaur on dinosaur action!

It's finally out! Together with Allison Yi Hsiang and @fieldpalaeo.bsky.social, we explored relative homoplasy in a range of bird matrices and introduce a new parsimony measure, the relative homoplasy index (RHI) (1/n) academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/a...

A small bump in case anyone awake at this time can advise on R/C++ debugging... 🧪⚒️💻

I'm disappointed to resign from the editorial board of @royalsocietypublishing.org @royalsociety.org journal Biology Letters. I won't give my time and labour away to an organisation that - through inaction - condones the destruction of US science by one of its own, Elon Musk FRS. 🧪⚒️

An interesting change from reconstructing dinosaurs and other terrestrial animals... My digital restoration and reconstruction of the cyathaspid heterostracan Anglaspis heintzi from our new paper (see below). #FossilFish #DigitalReconstruction #Palaeontology

www.youtube.com/watch?v=j04I... This is worth a watch...

Hi all. Last chance to apply for @thepalass.bsky.social awards -including the *NEW DOROTHEA BATE AWARD*. This is for an early career person with up to 5 postdoctoral research experience. Details of how to apply here: www.palass.org/awards-grant...

🥳 We would like to share a newly uploaded video on the #PalAss YouTube channel: 🎥 Palaeontologists Explain: How Do Fossils Form? ⬇️ 🔗  www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwF7... #palaeontology #fossil #youtube #video #channel #new

Very proud to be featured alongside other excellent early career scientists in a new video by @thepalass.bsky.social! We talk about how fossils form and how rare they are! youtu.be/LwF7qnYFde8?...

Here is a little video I made for @thepalass.bsky.social. Its aimed at GCSE students and ties into the national curriculum. Lots more planned, if you want to be involved, give me a shout. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwF7... Please share widely, like and subscribe!

Interested in trait evolution and/or connecting micro and macroevolution? The Evolutionary Quantitative Genetics Workshop has returned, now at Mountain Lake Biological Station, VA, June 9-13th! Deadline for application April 4th, 5pm EST. More info here: eqgw.github.io

Job Alert: Senior Research Associate in Phylogenomics @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social researching timing, sequence and phenotypic consequences of rediploidisation following whole genome duplication - comparative genomics, molecular clock and phenotypic disparity methods, with @jameswclark.bsky.social

Check out our new method for summarising BEAST trees. The CCD0-MAP tree gives much more accurate results than MCC tree. It returns the tree that maximises the product of sampled clade probabilities regardless of whether that tree was sampled. Highly recommend :) journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Happy to announce that, as of April, I will be joining @bristolbiosci.bsky.social as a Lecturer and operational lead of the Bioinformatics MSc programme!

This looks interesting BUT... In what way is a hagfish basal? journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Job alert! We seek to appoint a new Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology in the School of Biological Sciences, find out more at the link below! www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Phylogeny is important!

"A thief has stolen our stuff!" the thief complained. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... This looks right up my street, can't wait to read!

I was today years old when I found this gem of a web app to explore 2500+ color palettes for R: r-graph-gallery.com/color-palett...

Check out the tutorial for posterior predictive simulations on the revbayes website revbayes.github.io/tutorials/pp...

So excited to see this paper finally published! 🥳 This was the main focus of my PhD and demonstrates the application of model adequacy for models of morphological evolution. 1/n academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

For #FossilFriday check out this gorgeous fossil insect! This 49 million year old beauty is Pulchritudo attenboroughi, a #beetle found in the rocks of the Green River Formation, Colorado. what's particularly striking about this fossil is the pattern on its wing cases. ⚒️🧪🦀🦑 #evosky

Hello 👋We are Open Palaeontology, or OPal, a brand new Diamond Open Access journal for palaeontology research. Our mission is to provide a flexible platform for research that is free to authors and readers. Read more in our editorial www.openpalaeo.org/article/view... or at www.openpalaeo.org!