New research out today! Some animals have three eyes?! This eye isn't for "seeing" per se, but it's connected to a part of the brain responsible for regulating body temperature. So if you see a lizard basking out in the sun to get warm, oftentimes this eye plays a central role. But there's more...

A giant plagiosaurid temnospondyl from Bjørnøya (Svalbard, Norway) and the origin of the plagiosaurid body plan - Schoch - 2026 - Papers in Palaeontology - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A giant plagiosaurid temnospondyl from Bjørnøya (Svalbard, Norway) and the origin of the plagiosaurid body plan

An articulated temnospondyl skeleton from Middle Triassic deposits of Bjørnøya (Bear Island) in the western Barents Sea is described as a new plagiosaurid genus and species, Arctobatrachus urdensis. ...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Internal decline and the final punch of mass extinctions in the extinction of clades. "Once proportional diversity fell below a critical threshold (mean of approximately 0.13), major abiotic perturbations acted as the ‘last straw’," nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

Haven't seen Odyssey yet, but Emily Watson is doing exactly what us paleo people do every time a new dinosaur movie comes out: assume that failure to fully engage with our passionate and hard-won understanding of an academic subject means a film has failed as entertainment or even as art in itself.

Exciting palaeo events! July 29 6 - 9pm: Fossil Treasures from the Burgess Shale @ TELUS Spark, Calgary, AB August 2, 6:30 - 8:30 pm: Devil's Coulee - Sunset Tour of the Fossil Site @ Warner, AB albertapaleo.org/events/calen... #palaeontology #paleontology #fossils #dinosaurs #events

Happy to present the latest work from my PhD as an advance article in @journal-evo.bsky.social today! David Evans and I present an analysis of feeding mechanics in an ontogenetic series of the hadrosaurid Corythosaurus, the first of its kind in dinosaurs. A thread [1/12] doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Ontogenetic changes in the cranial biomechanics of a crested hadrosaurid dinosaur

Abstract. Mesozoic ecosystems differed from the present in the abundance of large-bodied herbivores that grew through several feeding envelopes, raising th

doi.org

🐸Clouded salamander (Aneides ferreus). Max size 13 cm (5.1"). Eats insects and other invertebrates. Found in coastal forests of California and Oregon. Considered Least Concern by the IUCN. 📷by wirestock on Freepik

Let me introduce you to Tametara mirim, a basal Cretaceous snake from South America that was likely fossorial. It is known from a beautifully preserved and articulated specimen that includes a skull! If you know anything about snake fossils you will know that is VERY rare #snakes #paleoart

Say hello to Albadris smithsoni! The 'Scottish thorn'. A tiny fossil jaw with a bigger story. Some 310 million years ago, when Scotland was engulfed in jungle and dripping with humidity, this amphibian scurried among the trees that would later get buried and turned into coal.

OK here we go, as promised. Super detailed tutorials on how to duplicate the full pipeline (sans spatial). # install.packages("remotes") remotes::install_github("jakeberv/bifrost") jakeberv.com/bifrost/arti... Issues here: github.com/jakeberv/bif... Or, click the "Open in Colab" button.

Articles

jakeberv.com

Jake Berv@jakeberv.bsky.social · 2w ago

Happy to share this 'capstone' project from my time as a postdoc @umich.edu, where we show that hierarchically nested bursts of body-shape evolution may underlie much of perching-bird diversification over ~50 million years. Free access link here: rdcu.be/fuxB1

New paper day! From former MSc student Nathan Cochran's @paleodude.bsky.social work...you know how annoying it is to accidentally bite your lip? Imagine if you were a Dimetrodon!

First observed cranial pathology in the early Permian synapsid Dimetrodon limbatus

Dimetrodon is an early non-mammalian synapsid from the early Permian of Europe and North America best known for its elongated neural spines, which in life formed an interconnected sail, and an earl...

tandfonline.com

New Carboniferous vertebrate fauna from the early Pennsylvanian of Scotland. This interval is a bit of a gap in our knowledge of tetrapod evolution, so these are welcome data. 1/ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Late Carboniferous tetrapods from the Scottish Lower Coal Measures (Langsettian: Bashkirian) and a new nectridean | Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh | Cam...

Late Carboniferous tetrapods from the Scottish Lower Coal Measures (Langsettian: Bashkirian) and a new nectridean

cambridge.org

So, I will take the opportunity to write about our paper on the new fossil snake 🐍 from Brazil out in @nature.com today. Tiago wrote on the science itself here 👇 so I will tell a bit about the behind the scene stages, especially segmentation and anatomical interpretation bsky.app/profile/trsi...

Tiago Simões@trsimoes.bsky.social · 2w ago

Proud to share our latest paper in out in Nature today on the origin of #snakes. We present Tametara mirim, an articulated 3D preserved stem snake from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil. Tametara helped us re-tell the story of snake origins in a novel way... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper out today led by @gallinaciega.bsky.social We show that seed-eating songbirds have enlarged a somatosensory nucleus, especially the part associated with the tongue, suggesting that seed-cracking is dependent on a fine sense of touch. #ornithology #neuroethology doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Our work is out! Meet Tametara mirim, a new fossil snake 🐍 from Brazil that has challenged our views on early snake evolution! A jewel 💎 from the Cretaceous brought to you by an amazing team of colleagues among which @trsimoes.bsky.social and @nicolasdipoi.bsky.social! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exceptional brain and ecological diversity in the earliest snakes - Nature

A well-preserved fossil snake from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil shows early ecological and brain shape disparity in the group.

nature.com

Overall, we show that this remarkable story is not linear or simple as previously assumed. It follows a complex trajectory, with Cretaceous snakes already widespread in ecological and neuroanatomical diversity, and more specialized to different environments than the snake ancestral condition

Look at this beautiful stem snake!

Tiago Simões@trsimoes.bsky.social · 2w ago

Proud to share our latest paper in out in Nature today on the origin of #snakes. We present Tametara mirim, an articulated 3D preserved stem snake from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil. Tametara helped us re-tell the story of snake origins in a novel way... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Evolution of informed dispersal strategies in trophic meta-communities https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.17.739253v1

@jdpardo.bsky.social @friedmanlab.bsky.social @jackstack.bsky.social @reallyoldfish.bsky.social Fish people! The new layers they’ve been working at Kinney are quite nice

new temnospondyl from Germany www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #artandscience #digitalart #paleontology #science #research

With my upcoming departure from the University of Michigan, I've found myself deep in the job hunt process. Moving back to Canada from the U.S is certainly something I'm really looking forward too. If any 🇨🇦 labs (especially in Alberta) are searching for a µ-CT expert, please let me know!

Multielement apparatus architecture of the Early Triassic conodont Triassospathodus symmetricus: high-resolution x-ray microtomography onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #PapersinPalaeontology

The 1.5 year PhD article is wrong about some things but is 100% correct that we have turned a certification of research capacity and turned it into a state of being that easily consumes 5-10% of a person's life.

A beautiful set of branches of Archaeopteris, one of the first globally distributed trees, it's ideal for #FossilFriday!

Our newest paper on mammalian dental evolution, out today as the cover article in @science.org, lead by @narimanechatar.bsky.social with a team of fantastic early career scientists!!! 🎉🥳 “Performance trade-offs define a fundamental dental dichotomy in mammals” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Ok this is pretty interesting.

Nature@nature.com · 3w ago

Nature research paper: A queen odour mediates reproductive suppression in a eusocial mammal go.nature.com/4fiVIzv

New research out today! Some lizards lose their ears over the course of evolutionary history. This isn’t uncommon for fossorial species, like snakes and other limbless lizards. But, other instances often go without explanation. We look at one such instance, in a group known as the “sand lizards.”

#FossilFriday #SurvivingEarth The boomerang-head lepospondyl Diplocaulus @denvermuseumns.bsky.social

DEADLINE APPROACHING! ⏰ Apply to Comparative Developmental Biology by July 28. This intensive two-week laboratory course is designed for graduate students in their second or later year of Ph.D studies and post-docs. 🔗 More info here: go.mbl.edu/CDB

Inner ear anatomy of caenagnathid oviraptorosaurs: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... 🪶🧪 (📷Bazzana-Adams et al.)