I'M BATMAN! This ridiculous looking harbor seal isn't fighting crime, just fighting dry eyes. Pinnipeds still produce tears, but no longer have a tear duct to drain tear fluid into the nasal passage, so it just kind of leaks out everywhere. Not sure how it made this pattern though 🐬

On Friday I took my *luckiest* and *most disgusting* wildlife shot so far: a California sea lion (Z. californianus) puking up a bunch of rocks! 🤮🪨 That's right - many pinnipeds use gastroliths. The gastroliths are in mid-air! 🦖🐬🦑 #nature #photography #sealion

Minor edits of an old piece, sleeping Livyatan being curiously observed by an Australophoca, one of the smallest marine mammals ever. #paleoart #livyatan #australophoca

The coolest paper I’ve been involved with in a while just dropped! 1. we have (plenty) morphological support for turtles+archosaurs. 2. Eunotosaurus is a millerettid stem reptile, no stem turtle. 3. Without clear fossorial precursors, the ecology of shell evolution needs to be revisited (aquatic!?)

Our paper on turtle origins is finally out in Current Biology, with two major implications for our understanding of reptile evolution 🐢 #Paleontology #Turtles #Evolution www.cell.com/current-biol...

🚨 New paper alert! Delighted to have been involved in this @nature.com study using trait-based ecosystem modelling to examine plankton extinction patterns in the first *100 years* after the Chicxulub impact event at the #Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. ☄️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Researchers at Utrecht University have upgraded Paleolatitude - originally built to link fossil records to ancient climates, but now it is a free online tool that traces the geological history of any point on Earth over the last 320 million years 🌐 paleolatitude.org#!/

Hey folks! my first ever (and first author) paper is out! 🌊🐚 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... In this paper, we explore the fine details in the internal and external structure of a type of small shelly fossil (SSF) from the Cambrian to determine how they relate to one another.

Happy centenary Sir David! Are there one hundred things named after David Attenborough? Surely we should be able to compile a list… I will start: 1. Attenborosaurus a plesiosaur from the Jurassic Coast en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenbo... Let’s see if we can get to 100! /🧵

Ray-finned fishes are famously diverse, but we know little about their brains or cranial endocasts. @rodrigoichthys.bsky.social opens this black box with a dice-CT survey of 86 species across the actinopt tree of life. #OA in @royalsocietypublishing.org 🐟🧠 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

🚨 Out today: our Editorial in @jvertpaleo.bsky.social on an important issue in science - the reproducibility crisis in phylogenetic analyses. In it, we analyze several years of editorial data to ask a simple question: are things improving? www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

My latest for @sciam.bsky.social is all about the real biology, ecology, and climate science that is used to create the world of Pokémon, and how scientists use it to teach science in the real world. This is just about the most fun I’ve ever had interviewing anyone, and I hope you enjoy! 🧪🌎

A new paper I'm on is out today! Led by Stanley Somogyi, we suggest that ancestrally variable characters stabilized independently in different bird lineages, causing distantly related groups to retain similar traits and creating headaches for bird systematists. www.cell.com/current-biol... 🪶🧪

Ahhh!!!! One of my students just found a giant pinniped ankle bone in a tide pool and I’m pretty sure it Pontolis, a giant Miocene walrus!!!!

Had a great time at the Prehistoric Bayside Museum open day, giving a talk on marine fossils. Lots of people excited by our local fossils and bringing in their finds to be identified. Great job by Ben putting it all together, and thanks to all the citizen scientists for their help and expertise! 🐋🦭🦈

Long before becoming giants like this 22 m #BlueWhale (Balaenoptera musculus) skull, baleen whales were small. The skull I’m holding is a cast of #Fucaia goedertorum (body lenght ~2.2 m), an early relative that still had teeth and used them to catch prey. #WhaleWednesday

#sciart One of the two pieces I entered into the SCMNH Art of Nature exhibition: the holotype mandible of the sea lion-like "double-tusked" walrus Dusignathus santacruzensis, found in ~6-7 myo rocks in Santa Cruz, CA. Watercolor and gouache, ~10x5". 🐡🐬🦖

Surinam toads have a one-of-a-kind reproduction, as the eggs are pushed onto the mother’s back before being covered by her skin. 😮 After three to four months of development, fully formed toads hatch and leave. Hear more about this weird and wonderful creature from Museum scientist Jeff. 👇

New lab paper, this time on phocid limb morphometrics! Lead by former EDDyLab postdoc Dr. Leonard Dewaele, with @narimanechatar.bsky.social, Prof. Mark Uhen, master student Jacques Klassen, and yours truly anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

4/ Sun et al. - first fossil pinniped from Taiwan! A femur of a large otariid, Zalophus sp. - California/Galapagos/Japanese sea lion. This specimen is from the Penghu Channel. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

2/ Dewaele et al. - another morphometric analysis of phocid seal humeri and femora, and again, they seem not to be terribly diagnostic - despite most of phocid fossil taxonomy being based on postcrania. Doesn't look good. anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Today is International day of the seal, a time to celebrate all things pinniped! 🦭 Last year, I finally got to see Ontocetus posti from the early Pleistocene of the UK. This species is a close relative of the modern walrus that still has canines on its lower jaw!

Congratulations to the NHMUK! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

🧠🧪🧵1/37 Our new paper on how pinniped (seal and sea lion) brains evolved to unlock vocal plasticity is this week's @science.org cover. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#fossilfriday A cast of the well-preserved skeleton of the middle Miocene pinniped Atopotarus courseni, a relative of the much larger Allodesmus. Discovered in 1952 in exposures of the Altamira Shale on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles; ~15-16 myo. 🐬🦖On display at @nhm.org

Modeling Ringed and Bearded Seal Future Habitats Indicates Stability, Shifts, and Refugia doi.org/10.1111/gcb.... 🧪 🦑 🌍️

Excited to see this article led by @seishirotada.bsky.social out in @anatrecord.bsky.social. Triceratops and their ceratopsian kin are more than horns and frills! Check out their narial regions! doi.org/10.1002/ar.7...

It’s cold enough for walruses in New Jersey this week! But it wouldn't be the first time! During the Late Pleistocene (over 30,000 years ago) the area that is now New Jersey had walruses! We still dredge their fossils along the coast today.

Just finished updating my review on the evolution and fossil record of the eared seals (Otariidae) given the new paper that came out on the early Pleistocene Otaria josefinae from Peru 😅 #blog #paleo #paleontology 🦖🐬🧪 Read it here:

#FossilFriday The Miocene pinniped Allodesmus gracilis @nhm.org

Here's a fun one - colleagues did formant analysis on a harbor seal before and after he learned to modify one of his vocalizations. A growing body of work suggests Phocinae seals really do have fairly high vocal production plasticity. Wonder why... link.springer.com/article/10.1...

JOB KLAXON! The @nhm-london.bsky.social is recruiting a micro-CT specialist! jobs.nhm.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

The K/Pg extinction created a buffet for open-ocean fishes. A new paper shows that Pelagiaria underwent an adaptive radiation following the extinction based on new jaw shapes to fill the vacuum @knapprew.bsky.social @evoswami.bsky.social @sternarchella.bsky.social academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...

New paper! Here we look at shape evolution of the mandible in Pelagiaria, a group of open-ocean fishes that includes tuna and mackerel. We find that shape disparity accumulated rapidly at the origin of the clade at around the K/Pg boundary... academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...

I mean we HAD plenty of species of walrus. The problem is that they're all extinct🥲 Here's a phylogeny showing what was taken from us, and photographs of the toothless walrus Valenictus sheperdi and the short-tusked walrus Dusignathus seftoni (both ~4 myo, from California)🐬🦖🧪

In my professional opinion as a marine biologist, we have too many species of wrasses, and not nearly enough species of walrus. I will not be taking questions at this time

190 delegates attended #CAVEPS2025 in Kaurna Yarra / Adelaide this week! A big thanks from the organising committee to everyone involved for helping it be such a fabulous meeting! @megalibgwilia.bsky.social Next time, Otago! 🇳🇿

Hey everyone! I’m excited to share that one of my thesis projects was just published in @currentbiology.bsky.social and featured on phys.org! In this paper, we use an old statistical approach developed by the US Navy in WW2 to predict the aquatic habits of various dinosaurs and marine reptiles 🦖🐊

I’ve released a tool to sketch and edit phylogenetic trees! yawak.jp/PhyloWeaver/ Load a Newick file and intuitively add/remove/resize branches. Useful for quick conceptual trees, extracting subtrees, or turning ideas into Newick.

Had an absolutely blast at #SVP2025. It was great to catch up with friends old and new, and see the amazing science on display! Feeling recharged (but also exhausted) and excited about research!

#2025SVP For people who missed my talk: I’m happy to give this or longer versions via zoom/in person for your seminars/colloquiums. Being based at a small museum w/ little daily exchange among peers, it’s a great opportunity for me to stay connected & for you to learn about our shelled overlords.

@palaeo-jrule.bsky.social bringing Simpsons gifs to his talk on filter feeding in seals. #svp2025

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!

Just arrived in Birmingham for #2025SVP! Looking forward to seeing everyone. Ever wondered about the evolution of filter feeding in Antarctic seals? If so, come along to my talk on Wednesday at 4pm in Hall 1.

A Livyatan catching a large squid! this painting was inspired by a recent video of a modern sperm whale swallowing a giant squid. While Livyatan had a fierce arsenal of teeth and massive jaw muscles, we still don't know what it was eating exactly. --- #paleoart #sciart

Yes, the #PrehistoricPlanetIceAge trailer is out today...

Our controversial paper is finally out in @cp-iscience.bsky.social ! As part of my PhD dissertation at @qubelfastofficial.bsky.social in 2021, the last chapter was dedicated to a specific pathological pattern in hadrosaurid tails!

I picked up my poster for #2025SVP and it looks SO NICE 🥰 I'm very excited! Hope to see you there - my poster session is on the first day (Wednesday) so please stop by, though I know many of us will be distracted by catching up with old friends! 🐬🦖

Nanotyrannus is real. For years I’ve considered many mid-sized gracile tyrannosaurs to be juvenile T. rex. But I was wrong. This stunning new skeleton of a mature long-armed small tyrannosaur is clearly a different species. Isn’t science fun?! www.theguardian.com/science/2025...