I am so proud of my PhD student Kate Fish who just succesfully defended her dissertation today. Congratulations Dr. Fish! @kfish28.bsky.social

Thanks I figured you might like this!

Thanks! This was a long time coming. Exciting to see it out!

2.6 million-year-old jaw from extinct 'Nutcracker Man' is found where we didn't expect it A fossil jaw of a distant human relative was discovered much farther north than previously thought possible, revealing new information about diversity in human evolution.

Paranthropus in the Afar, pretty neat find! 🏺🧪

Afar fossil shows broad distribution and versatility of Paranthropus - Nature With its attribution to Paranthropus, a 2.6-million-year-old partial mandible expands the range of the genus into the Afar region of Ethiopia and adds to our understanding of hominin evolution in east...

I am really excited to share news of this new jaw...until now Paranthropus had been conspicuously absent from the Afar.

Fieldwork at Mille-Logya is not easy, and this fossil is the result of years of very hard work (and a lot of days of dry screening by our team)!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The title of the image is "College Faculty". Two side-by-side images of Tom Hanks appear. On the left Hanks appears as Mr. Rogers, with the label "Fall Semester Week 1". On the right Hanks appears bedraggled as in the movie Castaway, with the label "Week 16."

this never stops feeling real this time of year

My best writing advice.

I am finally willing to admit I was wrong and revise my position. Growth is hard, but….I am just going to come out and say it.

Swedish Fish are actually pretty OK.

its a food web....species connected to others with arrows, but this elliptical layout algorithm was NOT appropriate!

yes...100% I had the same thought!

image of a foodweb visualized in a star layout, clearly inappropriate for this network

accidental aRt #rstats #foodwebs

Not to even mention cuts to police force, and many other public services.....

If you are lucky to live in a place where you have congressional representation please help us! Help my kids! Help the 10s of thousands of children who will be hurt by this.

House continuing res will force DC Gov. (funded by taxes on DC residents, not fed. funds) to revert to FY24 spending levels, though we are halfway through FY25.

This means DC will be forced to cut $350+ million from our public/charter school budget, leaving more than 95,000 kids high and dry.

I am deeply saddened to have learned of the death, on Feb 5, 2025, of Elisabeth Vrba—a fantastically creative scientist and a warm, wonderful human being. She leaves us a legacy of original macroevolutionary thinking that is still fresh and illuminating.

100 years of Australopithecus On 7 February 1925, Nature published a curious paper on a ‘missing link’ – the fossil of a form intermediate between apes and humans.

pretty fun to see my recent paper (Barr and Wood, 2024) listed in this list of 100 significant paleoanthropology papers compiled in honor of the 100th year anniversary of the naming of Australopithecus.

Best grant writing advice I ever received:

"Write your proposal as if someone from a completely different field will search through it looking for 100 banned words"

Feeling inspired after an awesome lab meeting this morning with a great group of undergrads, Masters and PhD students in my lab.

Just in case you needed a reminder that amazing things are happening in Washington DC, in addition to all the other things.

I am very proud of my PhD student Nick Rosas for successfully defending his dissertation proposal! Lots of cool research on Middle Miocene bovids biogeography and ecology coming soon!

That's an amazing writing space. I feel like I might be able to write a book in a space like that! 🤣

Left panel - picture of Tom Hanks as clean-shaven Mr. Rogers, illustrating college faculty in Week 1 of the semester. Right panel - picture of Tom Hanks from Castaway, bearded and screaming, illustrating college faculty in Week 16 of the semester.

Once again, the seasons change, and this old meme feels 100% accurate.

The rhinos we have and the ones we lost.

In the late Pleistocene, about two thirds of the worlds terrestrial megafauna went extinct. Rhinos fared better than average, but still, all the temperate and cold climate species are gone. Those that remain are endangered and in dire need of protection.

Paper led by my now-graduated PhD student Jesse Martin where we argue that the SK 54 cranium from Swartkrans in South Africa is Homo, not Paranthropus. www.scielo.org.za/pdf/sajs/v12...

Human evolution is not out of the woods yet!

Congrats to Enqu on this landmark paper! In it, we present a new model for predicting woody cover based on an Africa-specific soil dataset. Results show hominin sites were ~13% more wooded than previously predicted!

authors.elsevier.com/a/1k5a6_14mM...

Spatial sampling bias influences our understanding of early hominin evolution in eastern Africa Nature Ecology & Evolution - The Eastern African Rift System (EARS) is a key location for the hominin fossil record, but the fact that it samples a narrow section of the continent has long been...

We conclude that we must take habitat reconstructions of extinct species as minimum estimates. We also point out that the rift is bad at capturing east-west gradients in variation. Free link to article here rdcu.be/dRqUm (4/4)

We then take published cranial datasets of modern baboons and guenons and ask, how much anatomical variation does the rift capture in these widely distributed primates? Turns out major portions of morphological variation are missed by the rift. (3/4)

We take modern mammals that live in the rift for part of their range. We then "blind" ourselves to each species' occurrence outside the rift, and compare the rift to the full ranges. Unsurprisingly, the rift reflects the drier, less woody part of species' ranges. (2/4)

In my paper, coauthor Bernard Wood and I explore the potential impacts of a spatially limited fossil record on understanding human evolution. We do this using two "thought experiments", focusing on the Eastern African Rift Valley. (1/4)

postdoc on hominin postcranial morphology to work on the Woranso-Mille hominins with Yohannes Haile-Selassie et al! apply.interfolio.com/137850

As true this year as every year.