We’re hoping to publish on more sauropods within the next year!

This is the first publication from a long-term collaboration with Matt Carrano’s research group at the Smithsonian and Sunil Bajpai’s research group at IIT Roorkee. Stay tuned for more exciting Indian Mesozoic science in the coming years!

A new turiasaur (Dinosauria, Eusauropoda) specimen from the Middle Jurassic of India Turiasaurs are large-bodied eusauropods found in Early Jurassic to Early Cretaceous deposits across Gondwana and Laurasia. However, their early history is poorly known. Here, we report a lower-midd...

Oh look, I’m a dinosaur paleontologist now 😁 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Rapid mid-Cretaceous diversification of squid and cuttlefish preceded radiation into coastal niches - Nature Ecology & Evolution Phylogenomic analyses of newly sequenced and published decapodiform cephalopods separate open-ocean and coastal shallow-water clades, following rapid cladogenesis from the mid-Cretaceous.

Sanchez, G., Fernández-Álvarez, F.Á., Bernal, A. et al. Rapid mid-Cretaceous diversification of squid and cuttlefish preceded radiation into coastal niches. Nat Ecol Evol (2026). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Illustration of the underside view of a Mastodon Giganteus skull, showing detailed molar teeth and large eye sockets. The skull features thick bone structure with pronounced ridges and cavities, highlighting its prehistoric anatomy. This 1852 plate emphasizes dental patterns and cranial form characteristic of the extinct North American mastodon species.

🦣 The Mastodon giganteus of North America /.
Boston: J. Wilson, 1852..

[Source]

D. Stefanelli, M. Marino, B. Mecozzi, R. Sardella, A. Zazzera, and M.P. Ferretti (2026)

Reassessing diagnostic postcranial traits in Pleistocene elephants: evidence from Palaeoloxodon antiquus and Mammuthus in Italy

Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 71(1): 155-171

www.app.pan.pl/article/item...

Decoupled phenotypic constraints framed by respiratory adaptation in the rise of land vertebrates Macroevolutionary models show that rib-based breathing released constraints on body size and cranial evolution in early amniotes.

Decoupled phenotypic constraints framed by respiratory adaptation in the rise of land vertebrates | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I organize a journal club. It’s the only way I get a chance to do some deep reading. Otherwise I end up skimming a bunch of papers every week and add them to the never ending list of “to read” papers in my endnote library 😬

New Radiocarbon Dates Push Mohenjo-daro Back to 3300 BC- Rivaling the Earliest Cities of Egypt and Mesopotamia - Arkeonews New excavations and radiocarbon dates reveal that Mohenjo-daro’s origins extend back to 3300 BC, reshaping the timeline of the Indus Valley

New Radiocarbon Dates Push Mohenjo-daro Back to 3300 BC- Rivaling the Earliest Cities of Egypt and Mesopotamia ⛏️🇵🇰 arkeonews.net/new-radiocar...

Rocks, Fossils, and Ecology: Understanding How Time Is Sampled in the Fossil Record The geological record provides us with absolute ages of past events and organisms, but it also contains information about what occurred within time intervals ranging from seconds to eons. Within this ...

Rocks, Fossils, and Ecology: Understanding How Time Is Sampled in the Fossil Record - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

What an incredible photo!

Culture was assumed to be unique to humans, but recent scientific discoveries have revealed that it's in fact widespread in the animal kingdom. This #PhilTransB issue is the first to present a comprehensive picture of the science & implications of this: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Female sperm whales support one another during the birthing journey—behavior that was long considered unique to humans and a few primates.

Read now in @science.org: bit.ly/4bIKkeo

The dawn of modern apes An Egyptian fossil places the origin of modern apes in northeastern Afro-Arabia

The dawn of modern apes | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

An Early Miocene ape from the biogeographic crossroads of African and Eurasian Hominoidea The Early Miocene fossil record documenting hominoid evolution has long been restricted primarily to sites in East Africa, whereas contemporaneous North African sites have only yielded remains of cerc...

An Early Miocene ape from the biogeographic crossroads of African and Eurasian Hominoidea | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Faunal exploitation at the elephant hunting site of Lehringen, Germany, 125,000 years ago - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Faunal exploitation at the elephant hunting site of Lehringen, Germany, 125,000 years ago

🧪🏺🦣
New study of fauna at Lehringen spear site, known since 1948 and always talked about with caveats [❓but maybe the spear is a co-incidence❓], finds it's "the most convincing #Neanderthal site with evidence of a successful elephant hunt with a thrusting spear..."

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

The global island species–area relationship for plants | PNAS The island species−area relationship (ISAR) is known to be near-ubiquitous, but its properties across the fullest span of island areas globally and...

The global island species–area relationship for plants | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our latest effort to understand ISARs for plants globally!

The Houston specimen is Shansitherium

Screengrab of two stone tools from figure. Against a black background, one on the left is an assymetric scraper, the one on the right is a déjeté scraper, made of lovely fine-grained, pale grey chert.

🦣🏺 Great paper comparing Gran Dolina TD10.2 monospecific fauna with what turns out to be an equally distinctive lithic signature.
Targetted mass-kills + focused stone sourcing = collab bison hunting & communal butchery, in proto- #Neanderthals c. 425-400 Ka.

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

Lifelong behavioral screen reveals an architecture of vertebrate aging Mapping behavior of individual vertebrate animals across lifespan could provide an unprecedented view into the lifelong process of aging. We created a platform for high-resolution continuous behaviora...

Out now in Science: The Truman Show, but with killifishes!

"Continuous recording of a vertebrate’s adult life from adolescence until death would provide a complete view into the behavioral architecture of aging."

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Having only seen the first episode, I thought they did a pretty good job of sticking with the fauna from a couple of formations, and to me at least, it seemed temporally and geographically cohesive

🦖 Free Webinar: 200 Years of Vertebrate Paleontology in South Asia
Join Dr. Advait Jukar for a fascinating look at the history and future of vertebrate paleontology in South Asia.
📅 March 11 | 12-1 PM ET
🔗 Register: anatomy.org/ANATOMY/Meet...

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

Graphic with two parts, a map and a chart. Top section: A map showing intact tropical forests in northern South America, most of them in the Amazon River basin. Three locations are called out: 1 is in Panama; 2 is on the eastern border of Ecuador, near the borders with Colombia and Peru; and 3 is in Brazil, on the Amazon River. Undisturbed tropical forest areas are defined as areas where no disturbances were detected in a comparison of satellite imagery from 1990 to 2024. Bottom section: Dot plot with confidence intervals. For each of the three map locations, the chart shows the average annual change in mist net captures for insectivores and for the total bird community. For all three locations, the average annual change for insectivores is in the negative and is lower than for the total bird community.

Intact tropical forests are seeing mysterious bird declines. Is another “silent spring” brewing?

Learn more: https://scim.ag/4aCs0Er

Surprising partner preference found in matings between Neanderthals and modern humans Male Neanderthals tended to pair up with female modern humans, but whether intercourse was consensual is unclear

Surprising partner preference found in matings between Neanderthals and modern humans | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was strongly sex biased Sex biases in admixture and other demographic processes are recurrent features throughout human evolution. For admixture between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans (AMHs), sex bias has been p...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Acceleration hotspots of North American birds’ decline are associated with agriculture Human activities might have accelerated declines of population abundance, but this acceleration remains underexplored. Using 1033 North American Breeding Bird Survey routes, we analyze abundance chang...

Thrilled to share our new paper out in @science.org, led by François Leroy and Petr Keil! Using the Breeding Bird Survey, we document not only a continent-wide decline in bird abundance since the 1980s — but, crucially, the acceleration of these declines over time. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Richard Bambach on his first day in his office at the National Museum of Natural History in 2005.

Obituary for a great paleobiologist Richard Karl Bambach (18 May 1934–20 June 2025) who infused the large-scale functional approaches to paleobiology and paleoecology.
doi.org/10.1017/pab....
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

Degradation of fish food webs in the Anthropocene The decrease in body size driven by the selective species turnover is widely altering fish food web topology and function.

New paper out examining fish food web degradation in the Anthropocene. We show the structure of aquatic food webs are changing-- even when species richness doesn’t. These signals are strongly associated with decreases in body size within fish communities. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🌐🐠🐡🦈🐟

Scimitar-crested Spinosaurus species from the Sahara caps stepwise spinosaurid radiation We describe a close relative of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, the sail-backed, fish-eating giant from nearshore deposits of northern Africa. Spinosaurus mirabilis sp. nov., discovered in the central Sahara...

Introducing Spinosaurus mirabilis, a new species of Spinosaurus found in the heart of Niger on our 2022 expedition. It sports a long crest on its head and was found in a basin environment near a river system 500-1000km from the nearest prehistoric marine shore.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...