Congrats! 🎉

Wowzers

A picture of a small concretion (rock) with a white blob in the middle. this blob was described as the worlds oldest octopus and called Pohlsepia. Our research shows that hidden under the rock are teeth that confirm it is a nautiloid (a relative of modern nautiluses).

An artistic rendering of the rotting Pohlsepia on the seafloor 310 million years ago. Sharks, fish and arthropods lurk in the background

I am so unbelievably proud to present 8 years of hard work: the worlds oldest octopus is not an octopus...

Pohlsepia is actually a really rotten Nautiloid (but oldest soft tissue nautiloid ever found!). 🐙❌

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

I’d love to be shown the pool in Ekebydalen when you have the chance.

I’m in Uppsala. I guess I’ll go out tomorrow morning to do a little naturalizing

I’ll have to go searching for vernal pools tomorrow or this week

Two stone tools, one narrow and pointed the other leaf-shaped, laid out on a white background.

Calling all archaeologists with expertise in British stone tools! These two just turned up among my father-in-law’s house contents. Unfortunately no provenance data. The narrow one is quite thick, diamond-shaped in cross-section, and the flat end appears to be broken.

Artemis II mission is about to fly humans to the Moon — here’s the science they’ll do Set to lift off this week, the NASA flight will take astronauts around the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

"We're going for our families, we're going for humanity"

Artemis II has launched. Follow us for coverage throughout the 10-day mission
go.nature.com/4c4ib1G

Carboniferous tetrapod fauna of the fossil lycopsid trees at Joggins and the origin of the hollow tree guild In their 1853 paper announcing the discovery of fossil tetrapods in the once-hollow trees at Joggins, Nova Scotia, Lyell and Dawson gave three possibi…

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New species of “living fossil” had jaws unlike anything seen before | Natural History Museum Tanyka amnicola was a relic of an earlier and more experimental time in the evolution of life on Earth.

🚨New species alert! 🚨

Meet Tanyka amnicola – a 275-million-year-old animal from Brazil with twisted jaws and sideways-facing teeth!

Find out more about this strange species 👇
www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...

This paper carries a special satisfaction for me. Years ago, Donglei Chen and I discovered small tooth-bearing elements in Silurian vertebrate micro-residues (obtained by dissolving rock in acid) of the stem osteichthyans Andreolepis and Lophosteus. We worked out that they must be the inner dental

New paper! How weird could Permian animals get? Turns out, pretty weird. Meet the stem tetrapod Tanyka amnicola from the Pedra de Fogo Formation of northeast Brazil

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

The Voyageurs Wolf Project of Northern Minnesota tags & documents grey wolf ecology & behavior: www.voyageurswolfproject.org

The video you see here is confirmatory proof:
Wolves. Love. Blueberries.

As much as 83% of a wolf's calories in summer months comes from eating berries.

Early synapsids from the Cisuralian (lower Permian) Pedra de Fogo Formation, Parnaíba Basin, Brazil: the first definitive South American “pelycosaurs” The paleotropics of Euramerica provide nearly our entire picture of Permo–Carboniferous terrestrial tetrapod evolution. The geographic sampling bias inherent in this record obscures important event...

New paper with @cisneros.bsky.social and others. We report the first pelycosaur-grade synapsid fossils from South America, which happen to also be the oldest synapsids from Gondwana.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Lots of bittersweet feelings tonight… tomorrow I will be in Uppsala… and the day after that I start my PhD.

Exactly

New paper published this past week!

Johansson scores women's hockey Olympic tournament-leading 4th goal in Sweden's 4-0 win over France Thea Johansson scored her Olympic women’s hockey tournament-leading fourth goal and Sweden inched closer to clinching the Group B title with a 4-0 win over France at the Milan Cortina Games. Sara...

Ja!!! Skål på Sverige!!!

Heja, Sverige!!! 🏒🇸🇪

Melanie and her freshwater mosasaur on the Dutch evening news! 🧪

A cooling rack full of golden, S-shaped buns.

Saint Lucy’s Day, 13 December, means baking ‘lussekatter’ - ‘Lucy’s Cats’ - which are soft, sweet saffron buns made into shapes the significance of which is lost in antiquity. Just out of the oven! I wish 🦋 had smell-o-vision.

Andersonville in Chicago is having a bit of a Saint Lucy’s Day celebration as well! Most likely because it’s a neighborhood with strong Swedish roots.

How common is it to make them with raisins? I have seen some before with and without raisins. personal preference?

The olfactory bulb endocast as a proxy for mammalian olfaction | PNAS Olfaction is a critical sense for tetrapods, playing a key role in survival and reproduction by aiding in food detection, predator avoidance, and s...

www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Large metoposaur skull on a 3D printer stage. The skull pointing upwards at a steep angle as if taking to the skies . . .

Blast off!

A new fossil fish sheds light on the rapid evolution of early lungfishes Qiao et al. report a new Early Devonian lungfish from China, Paleolophus, which bridges the morphological gap between Diabolepis and eudipnoans. Its three-dimensional preservation reveals cranial anat...

In the early Devonian #lungfishes — now considered "living fossils" — were all the rage!

A new #fish from China attests to this early diversification.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Yesterday I picked up a fun Swedish language (Svenska) book that has been surprisingly useful and enjoyable to read. This evening my new phone case came in the mail. The rest of this evening will involve writing, segmenting, drawing and an old fashioned.

Congratulations! WOW!

Dynamic omnivory shapes the functional role of large carnivores under global change - Nature Communications Omnivores like bears can switch between plant and animal diets, potentially helping them respond to changing conditions. By combining modern and fossil data, this study shows that bears shift toward c...

Albrecht, J., Bocherens, H., Hobson, K.A. et al. Dynamic omnivory shapes the functional role of large carnivores under global change. Nat Commun 16, 10896 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s414...

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