As the end of the year approaches, we're pleased to announce the OU Invert Paleo group at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History documented and described 33 new species in 2025, including fossil crinoid echinoderms, brachiopods, and snails

Helicoplacoid in a Santa hat and fossil friends wish you a very merry Christmas from the Cambrian mat grounds!

As the end of the year approaches, we're pleased to announce the OU Invert Paleo group at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History documented and described 33 new species in 2025, including fossil crinoid echinoderms, brachiopods, and snails

Assessing the impact of character evolution models on phylogenetic and macroevolutionary inferences from fossil data onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @daveyfwright.bsky.social @datadryad.bsky.social

Many thanks to @astigall.bsky.social for coming to OU last week to give an awesome colloquium talk & visit the Sam Noble Museum! It was a semester highlight for us in @oupaleobiology.bsky.social and (as always) it was super great to catch up and chat science with one of my favorite paleontologists!

🚨New paper out in Palaeontology! Check it out if you're interested morphological evolution, fossil phylogenetics, and macroevolution 🧪 "Assessing the impact of character evolution models on phylogenetic and macroevolutionary inferences from fossil data"

Check it out if you're interested in modeling morphological evolution, its impact on fossil phylogenies, and the macroevolutionary inferences derived from them. There's a bit of a cautionary(?) tale about continuous characters in here, too. Can't believe they let me quote Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan!

Seems like our students have been busy decorating Invertebrate Paleontology lab at the museum 🧪

A lot of great talks and posters by OU paleobiology students at the GSA meeting. Well done!

🧵The Geological Society of America / Paleontological Society annual meeting is next week! Here's a thread of research presentations involving OU Paleobiology:

New paper from Dr. Selina Cole's lab! "Competition or coexistence? Ecology and niche partitioning of pelmatozoan echinoderms from the Late Ordovician Bromide Formation (Oklahoma, USA)"

New paper! "Fossil tip-dating reveals novelties on evolutionary and diversification trends in three Late Ordovician brachiopod genera (Atrypida, Anazygidae)" Yay for brachiopods! 🧪

Huge congrats to @crowleyk.bsky.social (Wright lab) and colleagues on publishing a major taxonomic revision of Paleocene gastropods!

As a paleontologist, here's something incredible about the geosciences program at OU: 1. Overall freshmen enrollment has been * increasing * in recent years. 2. We have more students in our * Paleobiology * Bachelor of Science program than any other option (including the general geosciences path)

New updated preprint! Many thanks to reviewers for their suggestions and helpful advice for improving our manuscript. Check it out if you're interested in fossils, phylogenies, and modeling morphologic evolution! 🧪

I'm hoping to take 1 MSc & 1 PhD student next year in the areas of Phylogenetic, Computational, and/or Evolutionary Paleobiology. Please reach out if you are interested in joining the @oupaleobiology.bsky.social, especially if interested in working on fossil echinoderms. Link for more info below. 🧪

Congratulations to @crowleyk.bsky.social (Wright lab) and colleagues on their new publication examining niche evolution in gastropods across the K-Pg extinction!

New @oupaleobiology.bsky.social logo just dropped

Very proud of @oupaleobiology.bsky.social graduate students @crowleyk.bsky.social & Alysha Zazubec for their contributions to the 2025 field season on Anticosti Island. I'm particularly excited about the fantastic echinoderm fossils they found this year!

Mandatory airport photo of the combined Anticosti Island field teams of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History. Grateful for the assistance of students and staff. The core team remains for another week of field work 🧪

New paper for #FossilFriday by Sam Noble Museum / OU paleontologists Lena Cole and Davey Wright, with AMNH collaborator Melanie Hopkins. Check it out!

Flexible crinoids are really cool group of rare & morphologically distinct fossil echinoderms. They originated during the Ordovician but substantially increase in diversity, disparity, & abundance in the Silurian after the mass extinction, so a new taxon near the boundary is a significant discovery.

I'll have more info in a few weeks when I get back from fieldwork but I'll be recruiting 2 graduate students to begin in 2026 (1 PhD, 1 MS). My lab investigates macroevolutionary dynamics using phylogenetic methods & the fossil record. Please share with students having strong research interests!

Need to include "future leader of the National Academy of Sciences" on the list of possibilities when paleobiology students ask where their careers may take them

TFW you're about to leave for fieldwork so you create t-shirts for the team of researchers, staff, and students. This year's intrepid, multi-institutional team involves folks from the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History & the American Museum of Natural History. Does anyone else do this? 🧪

i'm a broken record on this topic but god i love being a paleontologist 🧪

Celebrating 2 years since Lyndsey Farrar joined the Invertebrate Paleontology team at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History! Lyndsey manages day-to-day collections operations & improvement, coordinates volunteers, engages in public outreach, & helps curators care for millions of specimens

📰 Assistant Professor in OU Mewbourne + Assistant Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology @samnoblemuseum, 𝐃𝐫. 𝐃𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐝 𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 has received a Junior Faculty Fellowship 🧪 👀 OU News: ou.edu/news/article... 📮Wright's feature in The Norman Transcript: link.ou.edu/4jXPPrG

Happy to be working these jaw dropping beautifully preserved fossil echinoderms on #FossilFriday 🧪

New paper! 🧪 Phylogeny and macroevolution of a “dead clade walking”: a systematic revision of the Paragaricocrinidae (Crinoidea)

Ancient catastrophes could provide keys to climate future 🧪 "The future is what we put in it now," Wright said. “We can make comparisons with what we know has happened...and use our knowledge of history as a baseline for what could happen in the future."

"The fossil record effectively provides a set of natural experiments," Wright said. "By studying these historical events, we gain insights into how ecosystems respond when pushed past their breaking points, which has direct implications for understanding biodiversity loss today." 🧪 #FossilFriday

The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History has an absolutely spectacular collection of fossil crinoids, including these beautiful late Paleozoic eucladids #FossilFriday🧪

Very excited to have Melanie Hopkins, trilobite paleontologist extraordinaire and Curator & Chair of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, and her student Gabe visit our collections here at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History! #TrilobiteTuesday

Congratulations to OU Paleobiology graduate students Kiera Crowley (Wright lab) and Nicolas Bell (Cole lab) for successfully defending their graduate research proposals to their committees this week! Well done!

Although fossils from nearly all major intervals of the Phanerozoic can be found in Oklahoma, it's a veritable Paleozoic paradise at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History #FossilFriday 🧪

Congratulations to @crowleyk.bsky.social (Wright lab) for receiving this year's Outstanding Graduate Teaching Associate Award from the OU School of Geosciences!

Congratulations to OU Paleobiology graduate students Kiera Crowley (Wright lab) and Alysha Zazubec (Cole lab) for receiving Paleontological Society Student Research Grants!

Paleontologists may quibble over various aspects of the Sepkoski Curve, but it's a fantastic framework for teaching. I show this in nearly every lecture of my non-majors, intro-level history of life class. The Sepkoski Curve is to paleontology what the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram is to astrophysics

Congratulations to OU Paleobiology graduate students Alysha Zazubec (Cole lab) and Kiera Crowley (Wright lab). Both were recognized with an Honorable Mention for this year's NSF GRFP award and we're very proud of their accomplishments!

WHAT DID THE BLASTOIDS KNOW #FossilFriday "Presumably, blastoids did not disappear at the close of the Guadalupian from stress over anoxic oceans 5 million years in the future." --Erwin [The Great Paleozoic Crisis]

Video of @oupaleobiology.bsky.social paleontologist extraordinaire Dr. Lena Cole describing what it's like to find a new fossil species during our fieldwork on Anticosti Island www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDF-...

Happy New Year from the OU Paleobiology Group!

New preprint of a study led by @daveyfwright.bsky.social with Melanie Hopkins (AMNH). What's it about? The answer is in the title! What did they find? Inferences from fossils & morphologic data cannot be made in a vacuum, but "...a place where all the different kinds of truths fit together" 🧪

🚨 Very excited to share this new preprint! "Assessing the impact of character evolution models on phylogenetic and macroevolutionary inferences from fossil data" 🧪

As far as I know, the Sam Noble Museum Oklahoma of Natural History has the largest collection of paracrinoids of any museum. In fact, we have many thousands of specimens of blastozoans, making it one of the most significant collections of these interesting extinct echinoderms in the world.

Congratulations to the fall 2024 graduates!

Reminder I'm recruiting a graduate student to join the @oupaleobiology.bsky.social lab in fall '25. My lab uses fossils, fieldwork, & statistical phylogenetic methods to study macroevolutionary processes in marine invertebrates, especially echinoderms. Please share & feel free to reach out! 🧪

Love to find the doors to our fossil invertebrate collections decorated for the holidays. Very cool biodiversity-themed tree and paper stockings for our awesome students and volunteers!

Reminder I'm recruiting a graduate student to join my lab group in fall '25. My lab uses fossils, fieldwork, & phylogenetic methods to study macroevolutionary processes in marine invertebrates, especially echinoderms. Please share & feel free to reach out! 🧪⚒️