Tiago Simões
@trsimoes.bsky.social
Assistant Professor @Princeton EEB. #phylogenetics/#macroevolution/#paleobiology http://simoes-lab.com Posts and views are of my own.
🐍 A team led by Princeton's @trsimoes.bsky.social studied a well-preserved snake fossil found in Brazil that's providing new insights into the origins of this "peculiar and yet highly diverse group" that "remains one of the biggest mysteries in vertebrate evolution."
Rare snake fossil offers new insight into the reptiles’ early evolution
One of the best-preserved early snake fossils, the Tametara mirim fossil dates back around 75 to 85 million years to the Cretaceous Period.
scmp.com
A newly identified snake species found in Brazil may be the earliest-known snake to have diverged from the stem line, according to research in Nature. go.nature.com/44JIwyI #Paleosly 🧪
Cool detailed account by @sobralg.bsky.social on some of the back stage stories behind our paper
Gabriela Sobral@sobralg.bsky.social · 2w agoSo, 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...
Early-diverging stem snake illuminates early diversity of our serpentine friends. Paper in @nature.com @trsimoes.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
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
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
To my international colleagues. You should be aware that there are two spellings of my name in Brazil: Tiago and Thiago. Each of us hates it when our names are spelled like the version. Brazilians know it… Now you also do. Just so you know…
Last of our lab talk today at the closure of #Evol2026: rates and drivers of amniote diversification across the Permian Triassic biotic crisis at room 23 (Diversification) by Shelley Wang
If you lose your sleep over the origin of snakes, worry no longer. Check out my talk today in #Evol2026 at 3.30pm room 22 (paleobiology and macroevolution)
Check out my lab talks today #Evol2026! Macroevolution of aquatic adaptations in lizards by Daniel Vazquez-Restrepo at 10.15am in Adaptation 1 Performance of methods to infer evolutionary rates using multivariate continuous traits by Izabel Salvi in PCM 1 at 11.45
Our lab is ready for the world cup! And we had a very productive Friday...
This will make my life easier! Nice work! "MorphSim: An R package for simulating discrete morphological data" besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
MorphSim: An R package for simulating discrete morphological data
Morphological data are essential for reconstructing evolutionary histories, particularly for fossil taxa, as they represent the primary source of information for integrating extinct lineages into ...
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The paper: Statistical and Structural Bias in Birth-Death Models by @phylieu.bsky.social & @omearabrian.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Statistical and Structural Bias in Birth-Death Models - Bulletin of Mathematical Biology
Accurate estimation of speciation ( $$\lambda $$ λ ) and extinction ( $$\mu $$ μ ) rates from phylogenetic trees is central to studies of diversification, yet it remains unclear whether commonly used ...
link.springer.com
Here is the cutest phylogeny I ever worked on: total-evidence dating and biogeography of hamsters (led by colleagues at Montpellier and Madrid): link.springer.com/article/10.1...
a hamster is wrapped in a blanket and holding a piece of orange
ALT: a hamster is wrapped in a blanket and holding a piece of orange
media.tenor.com
Meet Megachelicerax cousteaui, a 500myo sea predator that just rewrote the evolutionary history of chelicerates by 20 million years! New study in @nature.com by @cambrianlife.bsky.social Dr. Rudy Lerosey-Aubril and Prof. Javier Ortega-Hernandez
A 500-million-year-old clawed predator rewrites the origin of spiders and horseshoe crabs
Harvard researchers reveal the earliest known Chelicerata in a new study published in Nature. The 500-million-year-old fossil, named Megachelicerax cousteaui, provides unequivocal evidence of chelicer...
eurekalert.org
Nice study guys! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Rethinking therapsid phylogeny through Bayesian and cladistic approaches - Scientific Reports
Therapsids are early-diverging synapsids that thrived during the Permian and Triassic periods, and ultimately gave rise to mammals. They include six major groups, which already exhibited considerable ...
nature.com
Announcing The Evolution Exchange: a new interview series for the evolutionary biology community! This month, SSE President Dr. Gina Baucom chats with retired NSF Program Officer Dr. Sam Scheiner about federal science funding. www.evolutionsociety.org/the-evolutio...
Today is the last day to apply for the International Travel Stipends to attend #Evol2026 in Cleveland, Ohio in June! Funds can cover registration, transportation, food, and lodging. A budget template is available on the website. @evolmtg.bsky.social www.evolutionsociety.org/content/soci...
Society for the Study of Evolution
Site description
evolutionsociety.org
Almost as a small Christmas miracle, our second (and final) response to the supposed presence of varanoids in the Triassic: doi.org/10.7554/eLif... With M. Caldwell, S. Scarpetta, C. Brownstein, D. Meyer, and M. Lee
Cryptovaranoides is not a squamate
Claims for a Triassic-aged crown lizard merit detailed reanalysis, the results of which find that Cryptovaranoides is not only not a lizard, but is a more distantly related diapsid reptile.
doi.org
Come and join me and my colleagues at the Department of Biology, #LundUniversity in #sweden! We have am open position as Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Biodiversity. Apply here no later than February 11 2026: https://lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:848749/type:job/where:4/apply:1
Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Biodiversity
The Department of Biology was established in 2010 through the merger of the Departments of Ecology, Cell and Organism Biology, Biological Undergraduate Education, and the Biological Museums. The depar
lu.varbi.com
Today we had Simon Scarpetta from USF delivering a talk here at EEB @princeton.edu on the technical and empirical challenges in sorting the phylogenomics and biogeography of iguanas...rafting over 8,000 km from North America to Fiji!
Awesome week meeting with our whole team investigating the genomic basis of phenotypic evolution across all squamates at @princetonupress.bsky.social and @amnh.org with my fellow PIs @marcanthonytollis.bsky.social and Frank Burbrink and all our students and postdocs in this enterprise!
Our lab's PhD student Daniel's take on body size biases in tetrapod taxonomy: nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Too big to miss: body size biases in tetrapod species descriptions and their implications for conservation
While species descriptions are rooted in biological diversity, their timing and patterns have also been influenced by historical, socioeconomic, and perceptual biases. Among these, body size has long...
nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
