Dr. Davey F. Wright ⛏️🦕🧬
@daveyfwright.bsky.social
Paleontologist. Evolutionary biologist. Punk rock enthusiast. Assistant Professor & Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology. OU | Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. Fossils, macroevolution, phylogenetic methods, biodiversity daveyfwright.wordpress.com
"Our results highlight the limits of using extant, species-depauperate lineages to infer deep ancestors and the importance of fossils and other evidence that more directly sample early evolutionary history."
Joseph W. Brown@josephwb.bsky.social · 2d agoEarly-diverging lineages provide little information about ancestors academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan... From @phylieu.bsky.social @sinkingdiatom.bsky.social @omearabrian.bsky.social
"For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice who posted memes on a website called Twitter, before the dark times, before the Empire"
TwoSense@twosense.bsky.social · 3d agoDear Bluesky Elders, Tell us stories of the days when Bluesky was fun.
My thoughts today are with the >19 million specimens held by the Academy of Natural Sciences and the dedicated staff who care for them. This ANSP holotype specimen is special to me, as I named it for my advisor, John Lundberg, a former ANSP Curator and authority on all catfishes, living, and fossil.
The highlighted quote is fantastic. There’s a real desire among admin to capitalize on something that is fundamentally very difficult to predict: a future job market Fundamental skills - critical thinking, strong oral and written communication, and ability to learn - are always in style
Dominique Baker@bakerdphd.bsky.social · 3d agoA lot of universities will be facing big deficits and looking to cure what ails them. I just want them to be thoughtful about it.
"Crinoid biology and ecology" by A. Stevenson & M.A. Veitch
Crinoid biology and ecology
Crinoids (Class Crinoidea) are the oldest extant echinoderm lineage and possess one of the most complete fossil records of any marine animal group, sp…
sciencedirect.com
Phylogenetic parallelograms: visual comparison of discordant phylogenetic trees https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.18.752558v1
At least where I got my PhD, if I wasn't sure what I found, how it worked, if it was useful or significant, nobody pretended I accomplished anything.
Dr. Katja Thieme (she/they)@katjathieme.bsky.social · 5d agoWho are the scientists, what are their names, and what have they published on this topic. 🤦🏻♀️
Happy to share results of the @bat1kgenomes.bsky.social phase 1, providing reference genomes covering 21 bat families. New insights into bat phylogeny, ancestral genome reconstruction, European origin & ancestral echolocation. Great work by a team of 100+ colleagues www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Reference genomes and fossils revise bat family phylogeny and biogeography - Nature
An updated phylogeny of bats is presented, based on new genome assemblies and many ancient fossils and including all known bat families.
nature.com
It may be a fairy tale but I believe that someday my prince* will come *manuscript acceptance notification
I've always thought it would be cool to have my name associated with the idea that large scale trends in morphological evolution are driven by the selective sorting of species rather than solely by continuous, directional evolution of individuals within a population. Call it "Wright's Rule" 🤷
David Shiffman, Ph.D. 🦈@whysharksmatter.bsky.social · 5d agoWith all this bullshit news about President Trump renaming things after himself, I’m curious- what’s something you’ve always wanted to be named after yourself? For me, it’s a parasite that gives dolphins GI distress. I’d love for those blubbery jerks to go “oh no, I’ve got the Shiffmans again!”
Curator of Marine Invertebrates position at the NHMLA. Great opportunity for marine invertebrate zoologists, especially echinoderm researchers! (see post below)
Marine Invertebrates Curator | The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County https://nhm.org/ The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC) seeks a full-time Assistant OR Associate Curator, commensurate with experience…
spnhc.org
"What we know about the past record relied heavily on museum collections—the cumulation of centuries of investigation of the fossil record. The sample of past biodiversity will accumulate only with continued exploration of the fossil record...and restudy of existing collections." -J. Sepkoski (1992)
🚨 New bird paper! 🚨 Take a look at our review paper that Juan Benito and I put together about avian systematics and the bird fossil record along with what we think are important future directions in the field 🐦 🦴 🦜🦅🦤 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
A bird’s eye view of the fossil record: perspectives on avian systematics
Recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented rise in avian fossil discoveries that directly inform our understanding of bird origins and evolution, the stepwise assemblage of the avian body plan,...
tandfonline.com
In particular, I find stepping through writing my own code, in R, helps me understand the data I analyze in a way that I’ll never get from a vibe-coded script. It’s fine for toys, but for real science, I want a human’s direct understanding. Nothing else will - or should - do.
Still patiently waiting to be "left behind" by AI rather than it chasing me across every damn space like a slasher in a low budget flick.
all of this is exactly correct, and what i would add is: no person has ever spent 100 hours writing a scientific paper hoping, hoping with all their heart, that potential readers will skip that step to go straight to some mangled summary you didn't even write
Jeremy Yoder says no war@jbyoder.org · last wk.Okay this jogged loose something I've had half-written for a while now: Despite decades of effort, scientists have still not found a substitute for reading the paper denimandtweed.jbyoder.org/2026/09/desp...
when you meet someone and immediately become best friends
The new Resident Evil movie is really good and somehow very funny, especially if you've played the games. I can't stop thinking about it
you can ask a paleontologist their thoughts about the future but you can't stop them from living in the past
I found this MacClade instruction manual from 1992 when I arrived at the OMNH. I keep it in my office and treat it like a beloved fossil in our collections
One of my favorite office mugs. A treasure for any systematic biologist
The Venn diagram of Dr. Martin Luther King’s ”white moderate“ and today‘s “we gotta compromise on trans rights moderate“ is a circle
"One of the tactics that fascism revels in is depressing people"
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌@chanda.blacksky.app · 2w agoNEW WRITING 👀 I finally got my shit together and wrote a little newsletter about the Spectrum of Allies which is a helpful exercise and a better theory of change than "nobody with a bad point of view can ever change their mind" Please read and use and share the links within!!!
One of my favorite office mugs. A treasure for any systematic biologist
I don't want interactive AI "enhanced" pdfs. I want search tools that actually work
Biodiversity is an incredibly rich and fascinating subject at all scales, levels, and quantities of measurement
Boosting this MS position in @ugaecology.bsky.social part of a USFS collaboration - pre-application required, due October 1!
John Wares@johnwares.bsky.social · last mo.
"High-quality revisionary taxonomy must be grounded in experienced character evaluation and homology assessment, concept delimitation, and contingent analytical judgment, skills that are developed over years of immersive engagement with natural history collections" 👏👏👏
Milton Tan@mtanichthys.bsky.social · 2w agoNewly accepted work I contributed to: Challenges for reproducibility in species delimitation academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...