From collections to conservation: the indispensable role of natural history museums The IUCN Species Survival Commission has published a Position Statement on the vital role of biological collections in biodiversity conservation iucn.org/news/202607/...

From collections to conservation: the indispensable role of natural history museums

The IUCN Species Survival Commission has published a Position Statement on the vital role of biological collections in biodiversity conservation: a formal acknowledgement that natural history museums,...

iucn.org

📢 JOB ALERT! 📢 I am recruiting a 30-month postdoc to work on modelling the vision of trilobites @hfspo.bsky.social ! If you like 3D data, fossils, and functional morphology, this is the one for you! 📆Deadline 27. Aug Pls contact me with any Qs and share widely! www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Better late than never! If you haven’t yet read Isabelle’s latest paper on the impact of tweezers on table manners in salamanders, now’s the time. Check out her blog and the full paper at the link below👇 that’s an order 😉 metamorphosis-project.org/publications...

Whilst you're unlikely to see knights in chainmail wondering the streets of London, squamate lizards pack a secret body armour millions of years in the making...but like the band Hot Chip, over and over and over and over... 🧵(1/2) #FossilFriday @linneansociety.bsky.social

🚨New 🌱🦇 paper🚨 - We explore how fruit traits influence the diversity of interacting #frugivores across habitats and which traits relate to consumption by #bats in pepper plants (Piper spp). #OA in @funecology.bsky.social: besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Second PhD paper is out! We find: 1) aquatic and terrestrial salamanders have different limb bone adaptations, 2) complex life cycles promote different traits, 3) decoupling of external and internal bone traits increase diversity. Thread (1/8) and FREE link below! 🦎🧪 doi.org/10.1111/joa....

Habitat and complex life cycles promote morphological diversity in salamander limb bones

We examined the external shape and cross-sectional morphology of limb bones in 133 salamander species spanning the ecological and phylogenetic breadth of Caudata. We find that adaptations for aquatic...

doi.org

New bird paper led by the brilliant and talented Andrew Orkney! 🐣 We show that greater parental care is linked to greater evolutionary flexibility in how birds fly 🦅

Royal Society Publishing@royalsocietypublishing.org · 10mo ago

Great expectations: altricial developmental strategies are associated with more flexible evolution of limb skeleton proportions in birds #ProcB #OpenAccess #Developmental Biology #Evolution royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

📢 deeptime: an R package that facilitates highly customizable and reproducible visualizations of data over geological time intervals 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/2096... Fully #openaccess in @bigearthdata1.bsky.social with insight about deeptime📦 development and code examples! #rstats #geology #paleontology

FREE Paleontology short course at GSA 2025: "Open science, collaboration & reproducibility in Paleontology" 📅 Oct 18, 8AM-5:30PM 🔬 Learn GitHub, R programming & paleo databases ✅ All career stages welcome 💰 FREE

2025 Paleo Short Course

paleosoc.org

Thrilled to share our new paper out in BMC, part of my postdoc at @cornellvet.bsky.social! 🐘🐀 We found that larger mammals evolve more diverse morphologies, while smaller ones can explore many locomotor strategies without much change to their forelimbs. bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Body mass evolution as a driver of morphological and ecological diversity in terrestrial mammals - BMC Ecology and Evolution

Body mass plays a fundamental role in the macroevolutionary dynamics of morphological, ecological, and phylogenetic diversification. Given biomechanical principles, large body masses in terrestrial ve...

bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com

I'm so excited to share my latest paper out now! How did the ancestors of mammals make the switch from sprawling to upright, taking over the world in the process? Spoiler alert; it's complicated! journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Adaptive landscapes unveil the complex evolutionary path from sprawling to upright forelimb function and posture in mammals

The ‘sprawling-to-parasagittal’ postural transition is a key part of mammalian evolution from non-mammalian synapsids. This study uses evolutionary adaptive landscapes to reveal parasagittal postures ...

journals.plos.org

Cornell too! www.cornellsun.com/article/2025...

Cornell Sues DOE for ‘Unlawful’ Cuts to Indirect Costs for Research Grants

University administrators announced in a Monday statement that Cornell joined a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy and DOE Secretary Chris Wright which cut research grant funding for indire...

cornellsun.com

City toads vs country toads, who's the toughest? 🐸 See our latest study, now published! 🎉 By comparing the morphology of common toads (Bufo bufo) across 4 different habitats, we found that toads don’t quite look the same…🔍 Link 👉 : link.springer.com/article/10.1... @anthony-herrel.bsky.social

Do human-induced habitat changes impact the morphology of a common amphibian, Bufo bufo? - Urban Ecosystems

Human activities induce habitat modifications and the intensification of land use including urbanisation and agriculture. Human-modified habitats are often fragmented, generating patches separated by ...

link.springer.com

What a cool paper! 🤩 Using @inaturalist.bsky.social observations, Mayer et al. found that there are more melanistic snakes in colder regions than in warmer ones AND that melanistic snakes are more abundant with ⬆️ avian predator density 🐍🐦 Have look at it here: doi.org/10.1111/jbi....

This is an amazing local charity working with families and schools to help everyone learn to love to read! All donations are doubled this week, so dig deep! 🦖🦕+📚=❤️

Learn to Love to Read@l2l2r.bsky.social · 2y ago

Children's author, @evoswami.bsky.social, is dig dig digging deep for the @biggive.bsky.social Christmas Challenge this week! From 3rd-10th December, all donations to @l2l2r.bsky.social will be DOUBLED. Please help us reach our target by donating today and supporting our work: bit.ly/3Vk8O6q

🐿️ Through digitization, the National Science Foundation-funded program “Ranges” is bringing the traits of Mammalogy specimens online to become tools for transformative conservation science in areas like the biodiversity crisis and climate change: bit.ly/DigitizedMam...

New croc paper alert! 🐊🚨 In this new study led by my friend and colleague Thiago Fachini, we reassessed the cranial morphology and phylogenetic position of Barreirosuchus franciscoi, a peirosaurian from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil. anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

New paper alert 🚨check out our new study in Nature Ecology & Evolution on anglerfish trait evolution led by the fantastic @lizmillermacroevo.bsky.social! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Reduced evolutionary constraint accompanies ongoing radiation in deep-sea anglerfishes - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Based on phylogenomic and geometric morphometric analyses of 132 anglerfish species, the authors infer a Cretaceous origin of the clade and show that bathypelagic anglerfish are undergoing rapid pheno...

nature.com

Day 21 of posting cool mushrooms every day: The Bleeding Tooth fungus (Hydnellum peckii) has both teeth on its underside and "blood" on its top! The "blood" is extracellular fluid, which is squeezed out when the fungus absorbs water, increasing pressure until the red fluid is squeezed out!

📣 📣 📣 Still lots of TT jobs being advertised: The 2024-2025 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

ecoevojobs.net 2024-25

docs.google.com

Bears, for those who care.... a new paper. www.sekj.org/PDF/anz61-fr... Bear Feet with Björn: tarsal evolution in the origin of polar bears. — Ann. Zool. Fennici 61: 357–376.

Upper arms, forearms, even parts of our wrists originally arose in fish living in rivers, streams, and tidal environments hundreds of millions of years ago

Super proud of my 2nd PhD paper exploring shifts in evo. integration among reef fish fins with expansions in locomotor modes, out now in Evolution. Within modes there is much diversity in fin shape and weak connections between form and function. doi.org/10.1093/evol...

New paper! For all of you working with 3d scans (e.g. micro-CT, MRI), check out SPROUT, a rapid open-source tool for generating segmented and parcellated data, meaning your scans are separated into the individual elements without any manual labelling or training. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...