Well I missed Mineral Monday but I do want to share this awesome halite (salt) with blue colouring. #GeoscienceBluesky ⚒️🧪

The majestic Gomphotherium, but I’m really interested in the cute tortoise in front of it. #FossilFriday ⚒️🧪

The earliest amber from the Middle Devonian of China | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The earliest amber from the Middle Devonian of China

Devonian amber pushes plant resin origin back 65 million years.

science.org

We will have a 23 month research associate role opening to support our work on mammal fossils from the Isle of Skye. Open to candidates with substantial CT-segmentation experience with Masters or PhD qualifications. Advert should be out next week - will post soon but do get in touch if of interest.

Now out in Cretaceous Research, 2 collaborative papers using isotopes to investigate vertebrate palaeoecology & anomalous d13C patterns via a combo of amber & enamel geochem from Saskatchewan. Great work by Ben in leading these for his MSc! More research to come on this topic soon, so stay tuned.

Here is a link to an actual "paper" in a predatory journal; excellent trolling from a vampire! www.easpublisher.com/article/arti...

🚨 PhD opportunity 🚨 Join @palevoprim.bsky.social as part of the #ReVol project (@cnrs.fr & Wits Joint PhD Programme)! Spend 3 years investigating the southern African fossil cercopithecoids to reconstruct past ecology and behavior through skeletal morphology and dental microwear.

Happy Canada Day! 🇨🇦

Join us in Vienna! We are looking for a PhD student and a Postdoc to investigate innovation in corvids within the “Comparative ecological innovation styles” project funded by @fwf-at.bsky.social. More info: barbaraklump.com Application deadline July 24th. Please share widely!

If you're into brachiopods, or just brachiopod curious, here is an article on brachiopods that I helped write (a little bit, Sandy Carlson did most of the heavy lifting and cat-wrangling) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #paleontology #evolution #brachiopod

Brachiopoda 2025: A review and update

This review article on brachiopods is intended to serve several different research communities. First, those who do not study brachiopods — provide th…

sciencedirect.com

Plugging this pre-meeting workshop we're holding at the annual meeting for @societyofvertpaleo.bsky.social Would love to get a full house!

The Neotoma Paleoecology Database@neotomadb.bsky.social · last mo.

📢 Workshop Announcement | SVP 2026 Join us for “Using the Neotoma Paleoecology Database to Explore Quaternary Vertebrate Data” at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting. 🔗 More details: vertpaleo.org/using-the-ne... 📅 Date: Tuesday, November 10, 2026

This example is absurd, but it's also Really Very Bad. Springer Nature apparently has bots withdrawing papers from its immense catalog, with no human oversight. They are abdicating their responsibility to preserve the historic record. (2/4)

WOW!! This is one gorgeous emerald crystal. Trace elements give the green colour to this variety of the mineral beryl. #MineralMonday #GeoscienceBluesky ⚒️🧪

Hot off the presses, published online yesterday! Excited for my first coauthored paper with former predoctoral fellow Anubhav Preet Kaur, along w/ @amjukar.bsky.social + others on the Haro River Quarry research team. Download for free for the next 50 days! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🌿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

SUE: The T. rex Experience tour going strong, six years on. Open today in Calgary. 🦖🌿🐢🦎🪷 www.sparkscience.ca/sue

Remember folks, most entry-level jobs for Bachelor’s holding geologists/environmental scientists/earth scientists/whatever umbrella your department uses are going to be field based. www.aapg.org/news-and-med...

The Field Skills Crisis

Geologists warn that shrinking field camps threaten the profession’s future workforce — industry and academia race to save them.

aapg.org

Diversification of angiosperm reproductive strategies predated the end-Cretaceous extinction | Science 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

Interested in marine ecology + palaeontology for Honours at Flinders University? Great opportunity to learn about #sharks or #KillerWhales, how they feed, and how we can detect that using #DentalMicrowear. Great supervisory team! Interested? Send your CV and GPA to lauren.meyer@flinders.edu.au

"A Conventional View" is now online at B&P. We describe how pragmatic conventions help retain the utility of scientific tools when they outrun their theoretical and conceptual justifications, by unpacking what it means to treat higher taxonomic ranks as 'mere conventions'. doi.org/10.1007/s105...

A conventional view - Biology & Philosophy

A widely held view in biology is that higher Linnaean categories or ranks (genera, families, etc.) ought to be regarded as ‘mere conventions’. That is typically understood to mean that their utility and application stem from (relatively) recent conventions that have been adopted for their usage in biological classification. There are no underlying theories or robust ontological concepts of these higher ranks, in contrast to taxonomic groupings like species or populations (disputed as those underlying concepts or theories may be). Absent these conventions, the application of higher ranks are in important ways arbitrary, reflecting their lack of theoretical and conceptual grounding. Indeed, some taxonomists have argued that this lack of grounding justifies adopting rank-free taxonomies. Michael Devitt (2023a) challenges this entrenched view, calling it an exaggerated skepticism. Instead, he takes the continued use of higher Linnaean ranks as evidence that they reflect “minimal category concepts,” which do genuine theoretical and explanatory work by marking out a relative level of taxonomic hierarchy. We disagree. Here, we unpack what it means to treat Linnaean categories as mere conventions, arguing they are better understood as informational proxies for phylogenetic hierarchies. Yet, Devitt is right to focus on this case, as it provides an exemplar of how scientists retain the utility of scientific practices that outlive their underlying initial theoretical and conceptual justification. We conclude by offering an alternative explanation for this in the context of a pragmatic account of science that treats Linnaean classification as a biological formalization.

doi.org

I will be in Cleveland for #Evol2026 in 2 weeks so feel free to chat with me if you will be in attendance! 🐠

Emily Troyer@fishfetisher.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I am recruiting PhD students for my new lab housed in the Sam Noble Museum at University of Oklahoma! If you are interested in fish macroevolution, geometric morphometrics, specimen-based research & phylogenomics please reach out. More info here: fishdiversitylab.weebly.com Please share widely!!!

Interested in #macroevolution, #macroecology, and mountain biodiversity? I'm recruiting a #postdoc for an NSF-funded project at Yale, in collaboration with Martha Muñoz (Yale) and Maya Stokes (Florida State University). I'll be at #Evol2026 and happy to chat! Link below

#ProcB in @science.org | Drivers and mechanisms of convergent forelimb reduction in non-avian theropod dinosaurs: doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

How did so many theropod dinosaurs come to have tiny arms?

Shrunken forelimbs were likely a byproduct of large, powerful skulls—with one notable exception

science.org

TODAY! I am fully aware of how absurd a <24h deadline is but trust me there’s a good reason. if you’re interested in this postdoc, send me your CV immediately.🧪⚒️

Dr Dan Shugar 🇨🇦@watershedlab.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🚨Funding for 2yr postdoc w/ me & @geocron.bsky.social on landslide-tsunami-jökulhlaup project, but (this is the ridiculous part) I need to select someone NOW or I lose the $. If you're NOT in Canada (can be any nationality) and interested, send me your CV and transcripts by midnight MT, June 12. 🧪⚒️

Size-driven dietary partitioning in Archaeotherium (the North American “Hell Pig”) revealed through dental microwear texture analysis www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Museums hold collections for a reason: “Perhaps, he says, the next big breakthrough in charting our solar system’s deepest history won’t come from exploring some distant world but rather from studying samples of space rocks …from a drawer in a museum.” www.scientificamerican.com/article/rare...

Scientists found a piece of a lost planet in the Sahara Desert

Hints of high-pressure chemistry within a rare meteorite suggest this fallen space rock comes from a planet gone wrong in the solar system’s early history

scientificamerican.com

Brilliant synthesis about the role of the higher-order interactions in ecology and the hypergraphs as natural tools for their description and modeling 👇 t.co/MeubK8WLkK 🧪 #Ecology #Macroecology

A lot of Terras and colleagues' approach builds on our recent work on theropod lips (Cullen et al. 2023), which is great to see. We aimed to present a toolkit for assessing the likelihood of extra-oral tissues in extinct animals and hoped it would be useful to others.

Major new paper for #paleoart by Terras et al. on extra-oral tissues (lips, cheeks etc.) in Triassic archosauromorphs. They conclude what a lot of us have been saying for a while now: lipped mouths should be the starting point for restoring fossil reptiles. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Inferred presence of extraoral tissues in Triassic archosauromorphs and the evolutionary implications for the clade Sauropsida

Recent work has suggested that the presence of extraoral soft tissues (‘lips’), in the form of labial scales in theropod dinosaurs, could be inferred based on: anteroposteriorly distributed foramina ...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Did you know that Evolution Letters now publishes reviews?! Our inaugural one is fantastic! Deep learning is opening new doors for evolutionary genomics, especially for nonmodel organisms with sparse or uncertain genomic data. doi.org/10.1093/evle...