Uri Wolkowski
@deinocurious.bsky.social
M.Sc. in Evolutionary and Environmental Biology 🌿| Studied hartebeest 🐐 Ancient DNA 🧬 🦴 and Ecological Niche Modelling 🌍 🌧️| I like hiking, birding, and wildlife living and extinct 🏔️🦎🦤🦕🐆🦣
Happy #FossilFriday! Here's just a handful of the jackets we've pulled out of our bonebed over the past couple weeks. Unnamed (new!) iguanodont dinosaur Earliest Cretaceous Cedar Mountain Formation, ~142 mya BLM federal public land Grand County, Utah, USA
Trying to get back to a more regular #FossilFriday schedule... This time, one of the most unique mammals of South America, the sea-going sloth Thalassocnus. This genus of amphibious sea-grass specialists went extinct only 3 million years ago. Just imagine if they were still around today! #Paleosky
Uri Wolkowski@deinocurious.bsky.social · last mo.June was a very busy month, including an endemic-focused safari in Kenya - Which I hope to share more about some day! The multiple African elephants we've seen got me thinking about the much wider range of proboscideans in the Pleistocene. Cuvieronius spread over much of South America #FossilFriday
Exhilarated to share a 2nd @science.org cover article this month from our lab @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social! A collaboration with US & Mexico colleagues on the role of a Mexican biogeographic holding pen in shaping the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI)(1/11) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
June was a very busy month, including an endemic-focused safari in Kenya - Which I hope to share more about some day! The multiple African elephants we've seen got me thinking about the much wider range of proboscideans in the Pleistocene. Cuvieronius spread over much of South America #FossilFriday
Uri Wolkowski@deinocurious.bsky.social · 2mo agoCelebrating the new dinosaur #Kank, for this #FossilFriday some unenlagiids I've seen displayed in Argentina. The giant Austroraptor, at about 6 meters in length, is one of the largest paravians that ever lived. Buitreraptor is the most completely known member of the group. #paleontology #paleosky
Yesterday was #WorldSwiftDay , and a day prior I was lucky to have my best views yet of Little swifts - cute little aeronauts! Swifts are a successful and amazing group of birds, that take flight to an extreme: Some of them land solely to nest. #birdsky #birds #swift #wildlifephotography #birding
Today is #WorldParrotDay! To celebrate, a picture I took of one of my favourite parrots, the Burrowing parakeet. (BTW, they deserve a better, more descriptive name than that!) 📸: BA province, Argentina #parrots #birds #birdsky #nature #wildlifephotography
Celebrating the new dinosaur #Kank, for this #FossilFriday some unenlagiids I've seen displayed in Argentina. The giant Austroraptor, at about 6 meters in length, is one of the largest paravians that ever lived. Buitreraptor is the most completely known member of the group. #paleontology #paleosky
Uri Wolkowski@deinocurious.bsky.social · 3mo ago#FossilFriday The mega-tracksite at Cal Orck'o, Bolivia. A giant quarry wall criss-crossed by tracks. Until recently, this was the largest concentration of dinosaur tracks known - over 12,000!!! I visited the site last September: standing next to this giant Mesozoic monument was a dream come true.
#FossilFriday The mega-tracksite at Cal Orck'o, Bolivia. A giant quarry wall criss-crossed by tracks. Until recently, this was the largest concentration of dinosaur tracks known - over 12,000!!! I visited the site last September: standing next to this giant Mesozoic monument was a dream come true.
Uri Wolkowski@deinocurious.bsky.social · 3mo agoA pretty special #FossilFriday, as today we celebrate the 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough: an inspiration, a leader, and one of the greatest advocates for conservation for +70 years straight. The plesiosaur Attenborosaurus was named in his honour.
A pretty special #FossilFriday, as today we celebrate the 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough: an inspiration, a leader, and one of the greatest advocates for conservation for +70 years straight. The plesiosaur Attenborosaurus was named in his honour.
Happy Birthday David Attenborough! From the earliest days of television, to controller of BBC2, to bringing the wonders, beauty and fragility of the natural world to our eyes & attention - you’re a legend! www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...
Giant sea monsters are trending with the newly described Cretaceous "kraken"*. So for #FossilFriday, a better known super predator named after myth: Livyatan melvillei! A true terror of the Miocene oceans, I was thrilled to see original fossils and a skull cast of this killer sperm whale in Lima.
Uri Wolkowski@deinocurious.bsky.social · 4mo agoThis #FossilFriday I'm moving over from giant marine reptiles to mammals! Starting with one of the biggest of them all: Perucetus collosus! First claimed to be potentially heavier than a blue whale, Perucetus had since been "downsized" drastically. It was nevertheless a mightily chonky beast >
happy #fossilfriday! this is lyrarapax, a radiodont from middle cambrian china. incredibly, the holotype preserves details of the animal’s nervous system, indicating that their raptorial frontal appendages were protocerebral, as was its labum (art by @ultraluther.bsky.social)
This #FossilFriday I'm moving over from giant marine reptiles to mammals! Starting with one of the biggest of them all: Perucetus collosus! First claimed to be potentially heavier than a blue whale, Perucetus had since been "downsized" drastically. It was nevertheless a mightily chonky beast >
Another reptile group from the Cretaceous seas of Colombia: the long necked elasmosaurs, Callawayasaurus and Leivanectes. Unlike their heavier, shorter necked kin, elasmosaurs specialised in smaller prey, perhaps infiltrating schools of fish using their long necks. #FossilFriday
Uri Wolkowski@deinocurious.bsky.social · 4mo agoContinuing with the Early Cretaceous seas of Colombia, the ecosystem's top predator: Monquirasaurus boyacensis, "El Fósil". One of the largest and most complete pliosaurs known, a separate museum had been built around this specimen, leaving it exposed but in situ #FossilFriday
Ancient ivory from the straight tusked elephant Palaeoloxodon antiquus that roamed #IsleofWight about 100,000 years ago when still part of the mainland. #FossilFriday
I have to admit - with so much bleak and vile things going on in the world right now (particularly here in the ME) this sudden glimpse of optimistic futurism is a pleasant reminder that humanity is not all bad. We can do good things! At least once in a while. www.nasa.gov/news-release... via @NASA
NASA’s Artemis II Crew Eclipses Record for Farthest Human Spaceflight - NASA
Four astronauts aboard NASA’s Artemis II test flight around the Moon made history at 12:56 p.m. CDT on Monday, traveling 248,655 miles from Earth, surpassing
nasa.gov
i swear this gov is a TV show. the head of intelligence got hacked and used his real name for a porn account. the head of dept of war accidentally texted war plans to a journalist. and now former head of homeland security grappling with husband's secret cross-dressing double life in anti-LGBTQ admin
Continuing with the Early Cretaceous seas of Colombia, the ecosystem's top predator: Monquirasaurus boyacensis, "El Fósil". One of the largest and most complete pliosaurs known, a separate museum had been built around this specimen, leaving it exposed but in situ #FossilFriday
Uri Wolkowski@deinocurious.bsky.social · 5mo agoAnother Colombian marine reptile: Kyhytysuka, a late surviving ichthyosaur from the early Cretaceous. It shows us that even right before their eventual demise, ichthyosaurs occupied top predator niches. #FossilFriday
Out today is our paper 'Genomic history of early dogs in Europe', in which we uncover the identity of the dogs that lived in Europe before agriculture—during the Paleolithic & Mesolithic periods: doi.org/10.1038/s415.... A thread ⬇️ (10) @biouea.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social
For #WorldFrogDay, the best preserved Jurassic frog in ever found, Notobatrachus from the Middle Jurassic Argentina. Several well preserved species are known, and in 2024 scientists even described the first Jurassic tadpole, attributed to this species! #FossilFriday
Uri Wolkowski@deinocurious.bsky.social · 5mo agoAnother Colombian marine reptile: Kyhytysuka, a late surviving ichthyosaur from the early Cretaceous. It shows us that even right before their eventual demise, ichthyosaurs occupied top predator niches. #FossilFriday
Another Colombian marine reptile: Kyhytysuka, a late surviving ichthyosaur from the early Cretaceous. It shows us that even right before their eventual demise, ichthyosaurs occupied top predator niches. #FossilFriday
Not the easiest #FossilFriday as war rears its head again here in the Middle east... A throwback from quieter times: The oldest known sea turtle, Desmatochelys padillai from Colombia. Despite their ancient appearance, turtles returned to the seas at a much later date than many other reptile groups
"Two charismatic marsupial species that had been thought extinct for 6,000 years are alive in rainforest in remote West Papua." Oh yeah this is super cool as both the pygmy long-fingered possum and ring-tailed glider were previously only known from fossils 🤯🧪🐀 www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Marsupials previously thought extinct for millennia discovered in New Guinea
The chances of finding one mammal species thought to be lost was ‘almost zero’ and finding two is ‘unprecedented’, biologist Tim Flannery says
theguardian.com
For #WorldWildlifeDay , some of the best wildlife encounters I was lucky enough to have last year. Of all the myriad troubles of the world, it is an honor and a privilege to share this planet with such a great diversity of life forms. And a reminder that we should do more to protect this diversity.
Just saw the incredibly sad news that Hans-Dieter Sues has passed away. Beyond his major contributions to paleontology, in all my interactions with him over the years, he was a stellar human being. He took great joy in life and in being a paleontologist. I learned so much from him.
This is still RCI’s masterpiece. Look how they captured the weight and power of an animal totally unlike anything any of us have seen alive, in a mixed-media sculpture made of steel and old rocks. #FossilFriday
