We're publishing new guidance to support trans people who do fieldwork (any work outside the office)! Now we need your help to get them seen so please share! inclusivefieldwork.leeds.ac.uk/trans/
Laura Cooper
@transitionalform.bsky.social
Postdoc investigating the plants of the past at the University of Edinburgh, plants can be rocks too!
#fossilfriday An example of why the ANSP and its collections must be saved. Atlantochelys mortoni, a giant protostegid sea turtle - named in 1849 by Agassiz based on the proximal humerus fragment. In 2012, someone found a large distal humerus that FIT ONTO THE SAME BONE in ANSP collections. 1/ 🦖🧪
Here is our new paper: Global proliferation of opportunistic pleuromeian lycopsids following the disappearance of the end-Triassic forests. Peng J, Slater S. M, McLoughlin S, Rastier A, Vajda V: doi.org/10.1038/s445... #Paleobotany #lycopsids #Jurassic
Global proliferation of opportunistic pleuromeian lycopsids following the disappearance of the end-Triassic forests - npj Palaeoecosystems
npj Palaeoecosystems - Global proliferation of opportunistic pleuromeian lycopsids following the disappearance of the end-Triassic forests
doi.org
Another paper from our NASA-funded project on ferns has dropped! UWyoming MS student Fern (really!) Holian, developed a new schema for classifying fossil ferns, which are understudied. 🧪🌿☄️
Application of a novel schema for describing fossil fern foliage and investigating taxonomic and morphological change across the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary in western North America
Premise The Chicxulub asteroid impact at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary triggered a mass extinction 66 million years ago. Ferns thrived in the aftermath of the extinction, evidenced by the.....
bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Boom! A simply brilliant study of a pomegranate from Jacques le Moyne des Morgues. I mean, color, composition, wow. Today is his day.
Strange things found looking up fossil localities this week.
The paper a lot of our lab (@sannie-zishanfu.bsky.social @sandyheth.bsky.social @anajusagasti.bsky.social) contributed to on the indepedent origins of the endodermis with Tom Beeckman and Xilian Yang is out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Independent origins of endodermis in lycopsids and euphyllophyte roots
The endodermis is a vital barrier tissue in plants, but its origin, evolution, and homologies across land plants remain ambiguous. Here, we implement …
sciencedirect.com
Creativity is a high-risk high-reward feature of #science. No creativity = stagnant research! The miserable state of today's academia makes individual creativity a risk instead of an asset for a scientific career. You should read this article, carefully 🧪 doi.org/10.1038/s415...
How contemporary academic structures constrain scientific creativity and hold back early-career researchers - Nature Human Behaviour
In this Perspective, Haubrock et al. argue that today’s scientific structures constrain creativity and that strategic conformity is a rational response. They discuss how this holds back early-career r...
doi.org
Thanks to @scishow.bsky.social for their new video covering our research on Prototaxites, really great work here! www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gFg...
Those Ancient Giant Fungi Weren’t Fungi After All
YouTube video by SciShow
youtube.com
Our queen of the night cactus had a dozen flowers open on the same night this week. It was quite a show, worth staying up to see, plus the scent of so many flowers at once was incredible.
Astounding traditional Chinese artworks of the Cretaceous invertebrates from the Jehol (远古小精灵系列), featured at the Nanjing Paleontological Museum. Glad to see creative representation of insects in palaeontology.
Partial mycoheterotrophy: a common strategy in arbuscular mycorrhizal plants? Merckx et al. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Do you, or someone you know, study carbon isotopes? If so, you need this paper: ⚛️🌱☁️ "A century of research on carbon isotope discrimination during photosynthesis: from early breakthroughs to future goals" (by me and @schubertba.bsky.social) #TansleyReview #PublishedArticle #OpenAccess
A century of research on carbon isotope discrimination during photosynthesis: from early breakthroughs to future goals
Advanced plant growth chambers quantified the dependency of carbon isotope fractionation on CO2 level, making possible the reconstruction of atmospheric CO2 across 500 million years of earth history ...
doi.org
Unveiled this evening: the 170-year-old, grade ii*-listed, wildly inaccurate Crystal Palace dinosaurs, now restored to their original colours and off the Historic England at-risk register.
If you want an up-to-date summary of whale and dolphin evolution, have a read of my new review paper in @natrevbiodiv.nature.com! I’ve tried to cover as much research as possible in this, so apologies if I’ve missed you! doi.org/10.1038/s443...
The evolution and diversification of Cetacea - Nature Reviews Biodiversity
Cetaceans are a highly diverse and enigmatic group of animals with a well-documented evolutionary history. This Review describes the macroevolutionary and palaeobiological history of Cetacea, from the...
doi.org
My privilege to share some lovely stories from the science community about what Sam Neill's timeless performance as Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park meant to them—and why it will continue to inspire kids to chase their own discoveries for years to come.
Sam Neill Inspired a Generation of Scientists
The actor, who died at age 78 on Monday, embodied a passionate approach to research and positive masculinity in his role as paleontologist Alan Grant in the 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park.
wired.com
Paleo Week: Ancient Secrets of the Fibonacci Spiral www.botany.one/ancient-secr... Longer cones and a clockwise spiral lead to tighter seed packing in a Jurassic conifer #Botany #PlantScience
Paleo Week: Ancient Secrets of the Fibonacci Spiral
Longer cones and a clockwise spiral lead to tighter seed packing in a Jurassic conifer
botany.one
Friends of Fossil Forests seminar tomorrow "Opalized wood from Clover Creek, Idaho: A case study in the power of amateur-professional collaboration" 🌳🌲⛏️ July 14, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT (GMT-4). All info & RSVP to get the link: www.fossilforests.org/post/petrifi... #fossil #paleobotany #wood
It's so funny when people ask me what I do: "So there's this unfathomable mystery of life..."
Two year anniversary of when I first posted this comic
"Algae frequently get a bad press" 🤔 But reflecting further, most of the time they do good work. All about #algae in this excellent primer by John Raven and Mario Gordano www.cell.com/current-biol...
Algae
Algae are a diverse group of organisms that collectively have important impacts, both positive and negative, on the environment and on human lives.
cell.com
Something beautiful for the weekend! An extraordinary Acheulean handaxe knapped around a fossil shell c. 500,000-300,000 years ago! From West Tofts, Norfolk 📷 MAA Cambridge University collections.maa.cam.ac.uk/objects/4509... #Archaeology
Think you know aquatic plants? 7 facts that might surprise you 👇🌊 Read more: shorturl.at/0bCm1 As highlighted in @currentbiology.bsky.social, while at @ox.ac.uk @biology.ox.ac.uk
Seaweeds are not plants – and six other surprising facts about aquatic flora
The rules for plants can be different in water.
shorturl.at
🤔 Can a concept widely used in economics help us recognise alien life, from fossils on Mars to molecules in the outer solar system? A quick thread to explain a new paper from my research group : Can Pareto Optimality be Evidence of Life?, by Rodgers et al. 🧵 1/10 doi.org/10.1177/1531...
Very, very happy that our paper is finally out! We look at how tight a fit primates experience at birth, and found really cool results. It has been a long journey from collecting the first data seven years ago! A brief thread (1/8) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Comparative primate analysis shows that humans are not unique in having a tight cephalopelvic fit at birth - Nature Ecology & Evolution
Analysing cephalopelvic proportions among 29 extant primate species, the authors show that a tight cephalopelvic fit is not unique to humans, with comparable or tighter fits occurring in several non-h...
nature.com
This is cultural suicide and intellectual vandalism. In an era where humanities-illiterate tech bros have unearned god-like powers, we need historians, philosophers, ethicists, classicists more than ever. Please sign. (Reposting without 404) www.change.org/p/stop-redun...
Sign the Petition
Stop Redundancies at the University of Exeter
change.org
Call for Writers! 📣 Are you a student or early career researcher? Science communicator? Know someone who is? We're looking for our next round of Guest Bloggers for our journal blog The Paper Trail! Check out our vacancies page to apply, and read some of our latest posts here: buff.ly/7JVQmSx 🧪 🌍
Have you ever booped a trilobite nose? Kainops raymondi from the Devonian Haragan Fm. near Clarita, Oklahoma - Black Cat Mountain. #FossilFriday
🌿Brand new research out in Science today about angiosperm reproductive strategies and how they preceded the K-Pg mass extinction, led by UCMP PhD student, Jaemin Lee, and curator, Cindy Looy!🌿 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Diversification of angiosperm reproductive strategies predated the end-Cretaceous extinction
Angiosperm reproductive evolution is traditionally linked to the end-Cretaceous biotic crisis and subsequent ecological restructuring. Here, we report diverse and unexpectedly large diaspores (dispers...
science.org