The editorial board of Geobios aims to support 2 early career researchers (PhD or postdoc) in #palaeontology, #palaeobiology, #palaeoecology, #palaeobiogeography, (bio) #stratigraphy or #biogeochemistry.
Each award is 500€. Deadline May 31. All the information: www.sciencedirect.com/journal/geob...
Calling all fossilologists! Can anyone help identify this? It was found loose in a drawer, no data or providence.
What on earth could our little weird friend be? Please RT for reach because it's flummoxing us!
Final call for late abstracts for this year's Life and Planet meeting!
lifeandplanet.com
Close up with a beautiful nudibranch on a rocky reef. The lower half of the image is a palette of swatches made from the nudi's vibrant colours.
Once upon a time I just admired nudis and sea slugs.
But it was not enough. Now apparently I'm creating an R package to celebrate their colour palettes? 😅
First up, my Sydney fave, Hypselodoris bennetti.
#rstats #nudibranch #dataviz 🦑🐙🧪 #marinelife #invertebrates
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...
Figure of historical timeline for ideas in the manuscript. Caption reads: "An evolving view of phylogenetic biogeography. Each period (arrow) corresponds to one of the four periods discussed in the main text. The ordering of themes within each period does not precisely correspond to when key ideas were introduced or popularized."
New preprint on the recent history of phylogenetic biogeography, with co-authors Isabel Sanmartín and Joel Cracraft, now up on EcoEvoRxiv: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
Why not check out our portfolio?
We design figures, journal covers, graphical abstracts and more! 🧪 Graphics designed for scientists, by scientists! #SciComm
Find us here: www.sciencegraphicdesign.com
‼️🚨 Job Alert ‼️ 🚨
Two Post Doc Opportunities:
PDRA in Macroecology / Paleobiology
my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...
PDRA in Extinction & Conservation / Paleobiology
my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...
Any questions, please get in touch! Closing date May 1st.
A grey rock that has a beautiful fossil trilobite. The rock is rough, but the trilobite sections are smooth. One of the main features is a compound eye, made of of many lenses.
The beautiful preservstion of trilobite compound eyes will never cease to amaze me. On this little 400ish million year old Phacops you can see all the little lenses - each one a rigid calcite mineral crystal! Together they had excellent 360° vision, perfect for finding lunch on the seafloor.
I don't see this said enough: the widespread use of generative AI is not only making our jobs as educators harder logistically, but also emotionally. It is genuinely sad to be suspicious of students when you have spent so much time building a pedagogy based on trust and not being a cop. It sucks.
Graphical representation of the current database landscape and a possible idealized scenario for the structure of the palaeobiological database landscape.
Table 2 | A roadmap to sustainable funding
We can learn unimaginable amount of things bout the history of life, climate, geosystems and the processes of evolution from the fossil record. But we need strong database curation and financing infrastructure.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio
Very interesting - seems that like ammonites, some belemnites may also have survived the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. ☄️☠️ Unlike ammonites which only persisted a few 100 thousand years they lasted a long time - into the Eocene at least! 🤯
Our paper on the phylogenetic nomenclature of Caimaninae is the Editor’s Pick in Historical Biology! 🐊 Glad to see the topic highlighted.
www.researchgate.net/journal/Hist...
I’ll start to regularly post photos of Lebanese fossils alongside links to charities supporting the thousands displaced in this war. Even the smallest donations can save lives
Fossils on display at Memory of Time, Jbeil, and you can donate here: gofund.me/24a3cee49
👋 Back for #FossilFriday with more data on where/what new species get published!
Updated data and scripts: github.com/bryanmgee/ne...
Nature/Science: ⬆️in coverage through 1995
PNAS: 🆕, new species through 2000
Current Bio: 🆕, new species through 2006
Palaeontology: 🆕, new species through 2010
🧵👇
New paper out from @hoehna.bsky.social Lab, led by the brilliant @bjorntko.bsky.social! We applied the Pesto software (Kopperud & Höhna, 2025) to look at lineage-specific shifts in diversification rate on large, densely-sampled phylogenies across the Tree of Life doi.org/10.1093/evle...
Snails have this really cool structure called a radula that they used to scrape hard surfaces for food. It's quite entertaining to watch 😅
We’re interested in folks applying from all manner of disciplinary backgrounds. Biology, zoology of course. But also computer science, remote sensing, architecture. If you’re keen to work with LiDAR and point clouds, we’d like to hear from you!
Very cool! 🤓
Last week, amidst the hoopla over a new Speen, @fishfetisher.bsky.social suggested a review of naming papers in fancy journals in response to a post by @daveyfwright.bsky.social - I got bored after work and now I have (some) data!
🧵👇
#FossilFriday
#CharismaticTaxaAreOverrated
I mean, yes, fun dinosaur stuff is fun dinosaur stuff. But Myhrvold is mentioned in the recent batch of Epstein files over 1000 times (far more than Horner). Some of the correspondence between the two is very chummy and concerning. See: www.seattletimes.com/business/loc....
In which I provide a few thoughts on the new Spinosaurus species, S. mirabilis.
www.newscientist.com/article/2516...
I also stressed the deep connections between one of the study authors - Nathan Myhrvold - and Geoffrey Epstein to New Scientist. They didn't mention it, neither has anyone else.
The news about students seeking compensation from universities for COVID teaching has made me quite sad.
I can't say what happened at those universities, or what those student's experience was. My present university did not appear to be in the list.
But what I can say is...
This is figure 1, which shows palaeontological information in an Earth system context.
An analysis in Nature Ecology & Evolution surveys community palaeontological databases, documenting their contributions to science as well as their vulnerabilities, and provide recommendations for the future of open science databases. go.nature.com/3ZwTeGl #Paleosky 🧪
On January 5th, I resigned as a co-chair of the Student and Postdoc Liasion Committee. My resignation followed the US invasion of Venezuela because that was like an imaginary line I set up for myself as the last straw.
However, as I was organising the Round Table, I heard the concerns of members
If you are also dealing with a sense of betrayal, I think this is a good listen.
Scientific societies (plural) have failed us because they are, in the end, still behaving like boys' clubs.
Also TW about the incident in SVP24 Minneapolis.
pca.st/episode/d8b6...
Thank you for the hype!!
A huge massive thank you to all of the database developers, leaders & curators who contributed generously to this work (repping @paleodb.bsky.social, @neotomadb.bsky.social + many others). And to Melisa & Miranta at Science Graphic Design for bringing our work to life! www.sciencegraphicdesign.com
This paper is the first to come from the ‘Integrated Record of Ancient Life’ (IRAL) working group, co-led by myself, Ádám Kocsis, and @thefairestfowl.bsky.social, which aims forge a pathway to a globally integrated infrastructure for palaeontological and allied data - more work coming soon! (6/6)
...which in order to achieve, we must:
🥇 Incentivize data contributions
💰 Secure sustainable funding & invest in technology & innovation
⚖️ Ensure ethical & legal compliance
🔬 Promote open science practices
✅ Develop a standardized framework for integrating diverse Earth system databases
(5/6)
