Owen Goodchild
@paleowen.bsky.social
Comparative biology PhD candidate at the Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History studying the evolution of North American proboscideans.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Lower speciation, not higher extinction, drove African megaherbivore diversity collapse - Nature Communications
Massive plant-eating mammals, or megaherbivores, once engineered African landscapes but are nearly gone today. This new analysis of their fossil record suggests their decline was driven not only by hi...
nature.com
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/...
🦣🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦣 What was the cause of all those mass accumulations of mammoth bones that have been found across Europe and Siberia??? Natural traps or humans? Answers here: www.cell.com/current-biol...
Paleogenomic sex inference of mammoth remains sheds light on the anthropogenic nature of bone accumulations: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...
Paleogenomic sex inference of mammoth remains sheds light on the anthropogenic nature of bone accumulations
Moots et al. use ancient DNA to compare woolly mammoth sex ratios from anthropogenic bone accumulations and natural depositional contexts. The results show that accumulations are female-biased, which ...
cell.com
A 10-million-year biogeographic holding pen primed the Great American Biotic Interchange | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
A 10-million-year biogeographic holding pen primed the Great American Biotic Interchange
The movement of taxa between North and South America across the Panamanian land bridge, known as the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI), established modern-day mammal assemblages in the Americas...
science.org
news.berkeley.edu/2026/07/30/n...
North and South America weren’t always connected, but their mammals still found a way to intermingle - Berkeley News
Before the Panamanian land bridge formed about 3 million years ago, mammals on the two continents were isolated — or so biologists thought. New fossils show that they found ways to mix long before tha...
news.berkeley.edu
I like the big picture thinking, but.... 1. We are not clear on the timing of access or the nature of human involvement to megafauna in this dataset, in MOST of the sites. This study does nothing to address this. 1/X
Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.@arctomet.bsky.social · last mo.Hemisphere-wide evidence of Early Paleoindian megaherbivore specialization | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
More of this, please. Metin Eren, @brianapobiner.bsky.social, and others. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Hemisphere-wide evidence of Early Paleoindian megaherbivore specialization | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Hemisphere-wide evidence of Early Paleoindian megaherbivore specialization
The three earliest continent-wide cultures in the Americas focused on the largest prey, like mammoths and giant ground sloths.
science.org
Zhengheornis buyu gen. et sp. nov. Wang et al. (2026) Jurassic avialan reveals stepwise evolution of bony tail in birds Science Advances 12(27): eaeb5202 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ae b5202 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Zietlow, A.R., Everhart, M.J. & Polcyn, M.J., 2026. - Redescription of the holotypes of Tylosaurus proriger and Tylosaurus nepaeolicus (Squamata: Mosasauridae) - Deinsea 24: 1 - 21. zenodo.org/records/2041...
Redescription of the holotypes of Tylosaurus proriger and Tylosaurus nepaeolicus (Squamata: Mosasauridae)
zenodo.org
Reconstructed skull of Eunotosaurus africanus, an early reptile from the Permian of southern Africa. 🐢 Long hypothesized to be an ancient ancestor of turtles, recent work led by @semifossorial.bsky.social shows this curious creature is instead a 'turtleized' millerettid. (1/🧵) #FossilFriday
#FossilFriday it’s been a great week visiting the Texas vertebrate paleontology collection and the Texas Science museum to study proboscideans! From left to right below: the holotype of Gnathabelodon (Blancotherium) buckneri, a Torynobelodon mandible, and a Cuvieronius skull.
🌿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
#FossilFriday doubleheader from our lab: #1: descriptive study of a beautiful skull of the early diverging sabertooth cat Adelphailurus. Lead by @narimanechatar.bsky.social doi.org/10.1080/0272...
New material of Adelphailurus kansensis sheds light on the cranial anatomy of an early-diverging machairodontine felid
Adelphailurus kansensis is a puma-sized felid, originally described from fragmentary material in the Edson Quarry (Kansas, Mio-Pliocene). Here, we describe a nearly complete cranium from the Wikieu...
doi.org
🧠 At long last... our paper "Ethmosphenoid #endocasts elucidate evolutionary #brain divergences and interrelationships of stem tetrapods (Sarcopterygii, #Tetrapodomorpha)" has been published, today in Papers in Palaentology @thepalass.bsky.social - onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Ethmosphenoid endocasts elucidate evolutionary brain divergences and interrelationships of stem tetrapods (Sarcopterygii, Tetrapodomorpha)
Nearly half of all living vertebrate diversity can be traced back to a single lineage of lobe-finned fishes (piscine sarcopterygians) that radiated during the Palaeozoic Era. In recent years, the phy...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Young Boy Stumbles Upon Jaw-Dropping 2-Million-Year-Old Treasure During Beach Walk—Pure Wonder www.goodnewsnetwork.org/boy-finds-2-...
Boy Finds 2 Million-year-old Tooth From Elephant Ancestor on Beach Walk
An 11-year-old boy made a once-in-a-lifetime discovery after finding a 2-million-year-old elephant tooth right on the beach.
goodnewsnetwork.org
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
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Ground squirrel coprolites preserve complex archives of ancient environmental DNA over 700,000 years - Nature Communications
Ancient faeces are powerful archives of ancient environmental DNA with the potential to illuminate both ecosystem history and evolution. This study shows that arctic ground squirrel droppings from the...
nature.com
Cuvieronius was an elephant relative with spiral-shaped tusks! The genus was found in parts of North and South America during the Pleistocene epoch
fr.pensoft.net/article/1748...
Blancan climate and feeding strategies of proboscideans and equids revealed by a multi-proxy geochemical analysis from a new locality in north-western Mexico
We present a multi-proxy geochemical analysis of proboscidean and equid teeth from a newly-documented Blancan (Pliocene–Pleistocene) locality in north-western Mexico. Eleven dental elements (six from ...
fr.pensoft.net
Investigation of the migratory behavior of Notiomastodon platensis (Gomphotheriidae, Proboscidea) in northeastern Brazil during the late Pleistocene based on radiogenic and stable isotope ratios (87Sr/86Sr, δ13C, and δ18O) [Paywall] www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Investigation of the migratory behavior of Notiomastodon platensis (Gomphotheriidae, Proboscidea) in northeastern Brazil during the late Pleistocene based on radiogenic and stable isotope ratios (87Sr...
The study of migratory behaviors and dietary adaptations of extinct megafauna, particularly proboscideans such as Notiomastodon platensis, provides ke…
sciencedirect.com
Bicknell et al. - New exceptionally preserved arthropod from the Furongian of Canada doi.org/10.1186/s129... #Cambrian #arthropd #fossil #Canada #palaeontology
Our paper on turtle origins is finally out in Current Biology, with two major implications for our understanding of reptile evolution 🐢 #Paleontology #Turtles #Evolution www.cell.com/current-biol...
The latest contribution on turtle origins...sister to archosaurs (again). I don't have a stake in this discussion, so it has been fascinating to see how our understanding of turtle origins has evolved (no pun intended) during the course of my career.
The phylogenetic origin of turtles
Jenkins et al. present the largest morphological dataset for early reptile phylogeny, recovering turtles as sisters to archosaurs and rejecting Eunotosaurus as a stem turtle. Instead, Eunotosaurus is ...
cell.com
Turtles finally have a place in the tree of life: X-ray study of South African fossils was a decider theconversation.com/turtles-fina...
Turtles finally have a place in the tree of life: X-ray study of South African fossils was a decider
Palaeontologists have got a clearer picture of where turtles fit in the animal kingdom, thanks to analysis of a southern African fossil.
theconversation.com
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Welcome Parachoerodon rhynchus! A new Choerolophodontid from northern China. This paper was fun to review!
Evolution of choerolophodontids in the Miocene of northern China
Choerolophodontidae is one of the four major groups of early Elephantimorpha. However, this group has received only limited study in comparison with the other three families, i.e. Mammutidae, Gomph...
tandfonline.com
Early evidence for a stable and flexible foraging niche in the evolution of Homo www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
pnas.org
