Alec Wilken, PhD
@alec-wilken.bsky.social
Assistant Teaching Professor at University of Missouri School of Medicine 🐯 Ears, jaws, and vertebrate paleontology (he/him)
Check out this great write up of our Thrinaxodon hearing paper featured in Popular Mechanics! 👂🙉🌽 www.popularmechanics.com/science/a701...
Scientists Discovered the Origin of Human Ears in the Skull of an Ancient Creature
While Thrinaxodon liorhinus didn’t yet have the sophisticated hearing equipment of modern mammals, it shows that eardrums began evolving much earlier than assumed.
popularmechanics.com
While we didn’t mean to ruffle any feathers with our last paper on the evolution of cranial kinesis in birds, we are grateful for the opportunity to keep the conversation going! Check out our response to Benito et al. out today in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/n)
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
pnas.org
🚨New paper alert🚨 Check out our new paper on the biomechanics of hearing in our cynodont ancestors! pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/n)
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
pnas.org
We created a database of all published paramyxovirus detection attempts in pteropodid bats! Lots of sampling gaps and avenues for future study ⬇️ Excited to share this PhD chapter with @danjbecker.bsky.social and @viralemergence.org, out last month in @plos.org 🦇🦠🔓 journals.plos.org/plosntds/art...
Paramyxoviruses in Old World fruit bats (Pteropodidae): An open database and synthesis of sampling effort, viral positivity, and coevolution
Author summary Paramyxoviruses are a family of viruses that include the human measles and mumps viruses as well as emerging zoonoses like Hendra and Nipah henipaviruses. These henipaviruses spill over...
journals.plos.org