Your tax dollars once paid a doctor at a VA hospital in the Bronx to study the venom of a poisonous lizard. It produced Ozempic, Wegovy, and a $38.6 billion therapeutic class. 🧵

🔬 Your tax dollars once paid a physicist whose own colleagues told him he was wasting the university's money. In 1951, Charles Townes sat on a D.C. park bench and worked out, on the back of an envelope, how to force molecules to release coherent radiation. 🧵 1/5

The smallest centipedes have 30 legs, while the largest ever discovered had 382 👀 🐛 Despite the name, no centipede with exactly 100 legs has ever been found. Surprising science explains why!

Incredible. That’s Frankfurt, London, and the Smithsonian all with calls for herpetology curators open at the same time. Unheard of!

They found a moribund Indonesian coelacanth in shallow waters in Sulawesi yesterday. This species was described in 1997 and has a story behind the description and discovery almost as crazy as the one from the original Western species in 1938. www.facebook.com/share/r/1VNQ...

The World Climate Research Programme @wcrpclimate.bsky.social has been aligning global research efforts towards policy needs since 1980. We suggest that an analogous organisation for #biodiversity science is needed in order to enable and support effective policy action.

Y'all - the Smithsonian is hiring three new curators - herpetology, ichthyology, and ornithology! Notably, this is a 2nd fish curator position - i.e., not the same as the one advertised last month. So if you applied for that one apply again. www.usajobs.gov/job/873849000

People always say "tell a story" but then don't explain how to do so! How is that helping? If we knew how to tell a story we wouldn't need the advice in the first place. 1/

Headed home from #evol2026, my last one as the Chief Meeting Organizer. I have so much gratitude to this community of amazing people. I hope you all feel as energized as I do. I didn’t get many pictures, so please enjoy this groundhog I saw by the Noble Beast

Love exploring climate change in the geological record? Want to teach about climate change with fabulous undergraduates? Yearning to advance your paleoclimate research in a supportive, scholarship-forward environment? Then come work with us at Colgate University! ⚒️🧪❄️🧪🌊🧪 apply.interfolio.com/188708

#Evol2026 I’m launching a new research group at UNC Charlotte in January 2027. Prospective students, postdocs, and collaborators are welcome to get in touch: [email protected] More at jakeberv.com, lab website coming soon.

To the #Evol2026 folks, I am recruiting MSc/PhD students (with or without their own funding) - please send people my way if you know of anyone interested in blending ecology & evolution!

I’m recruiting a PhD student to join our lab in the fall of 2027. If you’re excited about phylogenetics, comp bio, paleobiology, stats theory, macroevolution, etc. please get in touch! Folks at #Evol2026, you can talk to @brpetrucci.bsky.social & @sigournie.bsky.social to learn more about our lab

SSB Prez Tracy Heath announcing awards! 2026 Ernst Mayr Award goes to Dr. Rowan French​ for the talk Function and macroevolution of exaggerated male antennae in longhorned beetles Watch the Mayr talks from virtual #evol2026 on YouTube: youtu.be/QMiKMC9ctjw?...

Caught a mayfly mid-astral projecting.

So great to see @gbaucom.bsky.social 's SSE Presidential address on long- term weed evolution research program at #evol2026. She's had weeds in her sights since we were grad students together and has made such cool progress since.

Our lab has several #Evolution2026 presentations this year! Topics include SSE models, character maps, ancestral states, and deep learning Presenters: Raymond Castillo (@raymondcast.bsky.social), Sean McHugh (@phyllurus.bsky.social), Anna Nagel, Albert Soewongsono (@albertchristian.bsky.social)

The @systbiol.bsky.social Mentorship Program is back for 2026-2027! The program pairs off mentees with mentors based on shared interests in systematics and biodiversity research. Low effort, high reward! 12 virtual monthly meetings. More info: www.systbio.org/mentorship-p... Apply by June 12th!

Excited to present today at #Evol2026! 🐒 June 21, 4:30 PM 📍 Quantitative Genetics Room Topic: The evolution of sexual dimorphism in primates and how patterns of morphological integration, size and sexual selection may influence evolutionary change.

Exciting talk at #Evol2026 by the 2026 Gould Prize recipient @neilshubin.bsky.social! An advocate for “curiosity-driven research”!!

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨 We are very excited to share our next four talks in the Series 🥳 We are looking forward to hearing from Corinne Myers, Pablo Milla Carmona, @brpetrucci.bsky.social, and Emilia Jarochowska! Sign up now at bit.ly/palaeoverse-...

There was a symposium with two whole sessions on budding speciation? *wtf*

18 June 1858 The day Charles Darwin received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace that will change everything.. and speed up the presentation of the theory of evolution by natural selection, and the publication of "On the origin of species". www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter?docId...

This is perhaps top 10 most important letters in history

Frenchman or Werner Herzog?

Can we compare #living #species by their #extinction propensity? I think we can—and I’ll show you how on June 23 at 11:45 AM in Ecology I (Room 22) at @evolmtg.bsky.social

Looking forward to sharing one of my favorite projects of all time, developed with some of my favorite people! (with astonishing illustrations by @lifesciencestudios.bsky.social) Tuesday 12:00 pm Room 21 #Evol2026

Hope to see y'all at #Evol2026! I'll be talking about my simulation tests of cutting-edge fossilized birth-death models, and what we can learn from the Canidae phylogeny using these models. Come through! It'll be on Sunday (June 21st) at 5:15PM, room 22. Last talk first day 🤙

Huge Fish Curator gig is advertised! Assistant Curator of Fishes at the Florida Museum of Natural History (part of Uni of. Florida) explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/54...

This is a deep-sea isopod. Dr. Johanna Weston, a deep-ocean biologist and guest investigator at @whoi.edu, is confident this is Bathyopsurus nybelini, one of her favorite animals. Learn why via the YouTube caption: youtube.com/shorts/DenUj...

I am recruiting a #postdoc to work on assembling and analyzing #genomes of the amazing Furnariidae. Let’s unlock the secret behind their #evolution. The official application portal will be available soon at www.uno.edu/careers. Feel free to contact me for details at [email protected]

GOL DO PALMEIRAS NA COPA DO MUNDO

"Sabe desde quando um palmeirense não marcava numa Copa do mundo?" - Olha amigo, se tem algo que eu com certeza não sei, é isso.

um campeonato extra pós copa do mundo onde as quatro piores classificados da copa pegam os lanternas da série A do brasileirao

Sad to hear of the passing of Robert Ricklefs - a giant of Ecology who simultaneously pushed forward big ideas at multiple biological levels yet took time for detailed natural history .. McGill does a nice job summarizing his impressive contributions 🌐🧪 dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2026/06/11/r...

There's still time to apply! University of Nebraska State Museum is searching for a Collection Manager for one of the most important Paleontology Collections in North America. Come join us and work with nice people and incredible fossils. Please apply! employment.unl.edu/postings/100...

Interested in #macroevolution, #macroecology, and mountain biodiversity? I'm recruiting a #postdoc for an NSF-funded project at Yale, in collaboration with Martha Muñoz (Yale) and Maya Stokes (Florida State University). I'll be at #Evol2026 and happy to chat! Link below

25 minutes of Photuris tremulans fireflies in Tennessee's smoky mountains.

Last week the lab had a reason to celebrate as Julia Laterza successfully defended her PhD dissertation. Congratulations, Doctor Julia Laterza! Your dedication, perseverance, and hard work have led to this remarkable achievement, and we are excited to see what comes next!! 🐸

I will be in Cleveland for #Evol2026 in 2 weeks so feel free to chat with me if you will be in attendance! 🐠

How it started! When I began at UMMP 10 years ago, we were in the midst of moving and redeveloping exhibits. I spent a lot of time arranging cast exchanges to fill temporal/systematic gaps in our collection, giving visitors and students a more complete picture. This Mawsonia was a prize catch.

New study led by S. Llorente-Culebras on drivers of knowledge gaps in global mammal traits databases. 📊 Traits like diet & body mass are known for >97% of species, but reproductive traits for <17%. 🚨 Biggest gaps: data-deficient, recently described, range-restricted species far from major cities.

Interested in #macroevolution, #macroecology, and #mountains? I'll soon be advertising a #postdoc position at Yale as part of a newly funded NSF project. Stay tuned for details!

Happy ’Old Croone Day’ - scientists celebrate 4 June 1662 when Dr William Croone presented the Royal Society (London) with “…two embryos of puppy-dogs, which … were put in spirit in a glass-vial sealed hermetically...” marking the beginning of fluid preservation of animals still in museums today

Led by the incomparable Sanaa El-Sayed, a study out today in Science Advances throws open an important new window on marine fish diversity during the critical few million years following the K-Pg mass extinction. Below: artistic vision of the new fauna by Ian Baylatry.

1. How common is LLM use in scientific publishing, and how does it vary across field, publisher, journal prestige, author demographics etc.? @kylesiler.bsky.social has new paper in PNAS that addresses this question on a massive scale: 7.3 million papers from Elsevier, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers.

This whole story illustrates my thesis that LLMs are not a democratizing technology; they are an anti-egalitarian technology. As inboxes fill with these kind of scams, authors are forced to ignore cold emails and genuine good faith messages from the community get ignored.

Check out our new paper presenting pg-gpu, a GPU-accelerated population genetics python package: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/3

[new paper!] All-female, polyploid salamanders are weird: they have 3-4 sets of giant chromosomes, a mitochondria that doesn't match their nuclear genomes, and are made of fewer, bigger cells. We've thought about the consequences of this in lots of ways, stumbling on a neat one during my PhD..(1/n)