African wild dog (Lycaon pictus) paper now in @anatrecord.bsky.social's Feeding Biomechanics Special Issue! Using dissection & diceCT, we show powerful bites aren't just about bigger muscles—muscle architecture, skull mechanics & fascia may be key🐺 anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

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...

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

Homotherium studies

Our newest paper, led by postdoc Thayara Carrasco & published in @funecology.bsky.social, tracks functional diversity loss of land mammals during the Late Pleistocene extinctions in a grassland ecosystem 🧵 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... 🎨: @lacerdajulio.bsky.social

Long‐term changes in functional diversity and its implications for mammalian conservation and ecological restoration in a grassland ecosystem

Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Nature research paper: A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone go.nature.com/4v1yiFk

A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone - Nature

Researchers uncovered an enormous deep-sea accumulation of whale remains in the southeastern Indian Ocean, showing long-term, specialized ecosystems and an extensive fossil record that offers new insight into deep-ocean biodiversity and whale evolutionary history.

go.nature.com

📣Workshop Spotlight R for Paleobiologists: preparing and exploring fossil data for analysis with the palaeoverse R package @palaeoverse.bsky.social More info in our website 👉www.ipc7.site #Paleontology #PaleoWorkshop #IPC7

Something incredibly important about this paper is the recognition of how a huge swath of dog evolution didn’t involve them moving like the familiar wolves, foxes and pets of today. Think more like weasels or badgers for the smaller ones, while bears for the largest Miocene species.

My paper on Mesocyon is finally out! This will be part of a special issue on John Day Fossils Beds National Monument. Art by Kaori Chambers www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The first paper of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument 50th anniversary special issue of the Journal of Paleontology is out online early! @virtpaleo.bsky.social, Jennifer Cavin, and Xiaoming Wang describe a nearly complete skeleton of the dog ancestor Mesocyon coryphaus.

Elsevier: we will join the lawsuit against Meta for copyright infringement for AI training. Elsevier: Yes, this AI representation of an ear is an accurate representation for this mathematical model. Fig. 1. Schematic figure representing (...) the cochlea. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New study on Tasmanian devil & other dasyurids reveals how forelimb muscle structure relates to behavior. Dissections & CT showed largely conserved musculature. Differences hint at specialization in prey processing & arboreal movement Bidaye et al: anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

This is wild: the authors find evidence for giant, macro-predatory octopuses in Late Cretaceous oceans that might max out at *62 feet long,* comfortably large enough to attack, kill and eat mosasaurs

Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans

Top predators drive changes in ecosystem structure. For the last ~370 million years, large-sized vertebrates have dominated the apex of the marine food chain, while invertebrates have served as smalle...

science.org

Join the online course "Introduction to Palaeogenomics" by Transmitting Science, which covers ancient DNA concepts and methods. Register he… https://www.transmittingscience.com/courses/genetics-and-genomics/introduction-to-palaeogenomics-concepts-methods-and-applications-of-ancient-dna-data/ #course

Introduction to Palaeogenomics

Transmitting Science ONLINE course INTRODUCTION TO PALAEOGENOMICS – CONCEPTS, METHODS AND APPLICATIONS OF ANCIENT HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN DNA DATA

transmittingscience.com

Mammothssss

A short break from the Mesozoic… here’s a European Homotherium latidens trying its hunting skills during the latest ice age some 12,000 years ago. #paleoart #sciart #prehistoricmammal

New study! 🐾 The enigmatic ailurid 𝙈𝙖𝙜𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙨 𝙞𝙢𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙚𝙣𝙨𝙞𝙨 (Mammalia: Carnivora) unveiled: a systematic approach to the early Ailuridae Morales 𝘦𝘵 𝘢𝘭. describe an extinct ailurid species & propose a systematic revision of Holartic musteloids. Read here: buff.ly/5IHhpz3 #PaleoSky #RedPanda

Does anyone want a survivorship bias shortbread

www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Tex. Boards Abolish Faculty Senates, Create Toothless Councils

Two Houston professors have responded to Texas lawmakers’ assault on independent faculty governance by creating their own faux faculty senate.

insidehighered.com

Well, it’s been in the works for a bit now, but I should probably share my research proposal with the JSPS was funded. I’ll be moving to Japan this September to work with the National Museum of Nature and Science on Pleistocene through modern food webs. Excited for the next big adventure!

American cheetah, Miracinonyx

Paleo folks in the western US: The Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontology conference will be held Feb 14-16, 2025 in Mesa AZ with the Arizona Museum of Natural History: www.wavp.us/wavp-2025/ WAVP is always a fun, low-key conference, great for early career researchers. Hope to see you there!

We strongly suggest that academic publishers and other platforms that host research rapidly implement a Share to Bluesky button for their articles. Here's how: docs.bsky.app/docs/advance... #AcademicSky #HigherEd #Altmetrics

Action Intent Links | Bluesky

Authors, websites, and apps can use action intent links to implement "Share on Bluesky" buttons, or similar in-app actions. Logged-in users will be directed to the corresponding action view in the Blu...

docs.bsky.app

We're hiring a curator of Botany! The University of Nebraska State Museum is looking for a botanist (broadly concieved) to head the Bessey Herbarium. Good collection (350k specimens/3k types), good people! Please apply or share: The UNL application site link is: employment.unl.edu/postings/93856

Excited to share the latest in feliform🐅 carnivore research. Mosaic #evolution underlies feliform morphological disparity: ow.ly/hSze50SXutQ

Mosaic evolution underlies feliform morphological disparity | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Constraint is a fundamental concept in evolutionary theory. Morphology and ecology both are limited by functional, historical and developmental factors to a subset of the theoretical range species cou...

ow.ly

Very excited to share a huge project that's been a long time in the making. Interested in squamate macroevolution? Curious about how snakes fit into the broader ecological context of squamates? Looking for a new squamate phylogeny? Check out our new work: doi.org/10.1126/scie...