Spring is here

Our latest paper, now how to conciliate apparently discrepant evolutionary rate patterns in squamates, but which may well apply to any study system with Stephanie Pierce and @7brumas.bsky.social #macroevolution academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

I am extremely happy to see that our review on fossil tip-dating is out in early view in Systematic Biology! A huge thanks to all the authors of this massive project (@heckeberg.bsky.social, @basantakhakurel.bsky.social, Gustavo Darlim, and @hoehna.bsky.social)! academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨 🗓️25th September 2025, 15:00 UTC🗓️ Join us next week to hear from @nmkphylo.bsky.social and @russellgarwood.co.uk, on “The Tree of Life and Death: What do Fossil Taxa Contribute to Morphological Phylogenetics?” 🌳🐣⚰️ Register here: bit.ly/palaeoverse-...

Today I learned the (very) hard way that R will tell you a file does not exist even when it totally does if the path to it exceeds 260 characters (in Windows) (and you can enable long paths, but it is not the default)

A Sunday reading Fabre’s “Souvenirs entomologiques” by the fireplace is a Sunday well spent

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨 It’s time to announce our Summer 2025 talk schedule 👀 Looking forward to hearing from @spissatella.bsky.social, @sauropodlets.bsky.social, @nmkphylo.bsky.social and @russellgarwood.co.uk! Sign up here: bit.ly/palaeoverse-lecture-series-2025

📢 Tired of choosing between fossils to incorporate into your phylogenetic analysis? Us too. 💥 Check out our new preprint on incorporating stratigraphic ranges into the FBD model, implemented in BEAST2. We explore how using ranges affects the inference of dog 🐶 and penguin 🐧 trees 🌳

I'm recruiting a PhD student to join my lab at the University of New Orleans starting in Fall 2025. Research topics will focus on building and using phylogenies to study the diversification of birds, with an emphasis on Neotropical bird radiations. Contact me if interested.

I finally have something worth posting here! A new paper on wormsI never expected to see fossilised! Juracanthocephalus is the first body fossil of Acanthocephala and remarkably provides links with rotifers and other gnathiferans. Published in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Malvinas War erupted 43 years ago. Its memory remains to this day alive in every corner

Ahh the smell of fresh reviews in the morning

Check out my interview with @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social for some thoughts on phylogenies, uncertainty, and the complexities of life as a scientist

Great ambient music, terrible phylogeny, highly uncertain ancestral state

More good news!! Our (@russellgarwood.co.uk, @cambriannelids.bsky.social) 2023 article in Palaeontology is a #TopCitedArticle! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

One of the wood-associated seastars we described last year was chosen as one the top 10 new marine species of 2024! ⭐️

Like morphometrics, micro-CT scanning, and morphological evolution? Then please consider applying for our 18 month postdoc position at the university of Southampton! Details here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMF402/r...

The deep sea as a Dutch Golden Age painting

And finally have it in preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... In it, we (@basantakhakurel.bsky.social, @brenenwynd.bsky.social, @peterjwagner3.bsky.social, and Christian Kammerer) took a look at estimating a phylogenetic tree of dicynodonts using both discrete and continuous characters.

New preprint out with @echinerd.bsky.social et al. on total-evidence dating showcasing: 1) Sea urchins (the best clade) 2) Lyrics by Peter Gabriel-era Genesis (the best prog band) 3) Extreme effect of the type of relaxed clock on phylogenetic and macroevolutionary inferences (a bit scary honestly)

To celebrate the 7th month of our exile in 🇦🇷 (or 29.17% of our sentence), it sure is good to share with everyone that I have become a remote member of @trsimoes.bsky.social lab at Princeton EEB

I was sent this paper to review about a month ago by the journal MDPI Plants. After reading the abstract I decided not to. I will leave the abstract here without further comments. 1/7

Altmetric has gone rogue with a rant about atonal music and metal. @russellgarwood.co.uk I bet you didn’t see that coming

Urban paleontology

New paper in Systematic Biology with cool dude @jgsaulsbury.bsky.social academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

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

If you like snowflakes, check our new preprint about axial patterning in brittle stars ⭐ We looked at the expression of anteroposterior patterning genes in Amphipholis squamata juveniles, and compared it with existing data from other classes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... @lowelab.bsky.social

I overheard a guy at the pharmacy saying happy valentine to a neighbor, to which she answered “don’t be stupid, that is yankee nonsense” Love is in the air here down south

New year, new order of magnitude 🎉