If you're attending the Anatomy Connected meeting in Albuquerque #Anatomy26 come check my talk on Monday at 2:30 pm! 🦷

Lystrosaurus embryo!

Benoit J, Fernandez V, Botha J (2026) The first non-mammalian synapsid embryo from the Triassic of South Africa. PLoS One 21(4): e0345016. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

A WHOLE CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT My son needs lunch, and I have to put his backpack together, but a whole civilization will die tonight, so I'm wondering if they've closed their schools. Like, a snow day, maybe, except instead of snow it's "keep your children home so if you die, you die together" — instead of "well open back up once the plows have cleared" it's "we don't know if we'll be here tomorrow, hold your babies tight." It's just "talk" I'm told, which I've been told before. "It's how the president makes his deals." But I've never heard anyone talk about other human beings this way, and I'm not certain I can look my son in the eyes if we all agree to stomach it one more time. A civilization will die tonight, but as I zip up his backpack and kiss him off to school I think: if this is what we call leadership then I'm not entirely sure ours isn't already dead. @michaelfdubois Mukad A QuBoy @michacifdubois

Brutal.

DHS says it has body-cam footage related to Pretti shooting in Minneapolis The lawsuits aim to prevent federal officials from destroying evidence related to Alex Pretti’s killing and to end the surge of immigration officers in Minnesota.

It's been 66 days since agents killed Alex Pretti.

DHS has body-cam footage.

They haven't released it.

66 days and counting.

www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/...

Wind-carved wavy texture of a sand dune with oblique sunlight casting shadows diagonally across a tanned desert landscape.

Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes in Timbisha (“Death Valley National Park”), home of the Timbisha Shoshone.

In Chicago this week visiting the Field Museum collections to scan some fossils of carnivorous mammals with PhD student Melvin Vankelst 😍 🦝 🐻 🦁 🦦

Long bone variability in true seals (Mammalia, Phocidae), with implications for understanding their fossil record Historically, humeri and femora have been treated as diagnostic elements for fossil phocid (Carnivora, Pinnipedia, Phocidae) identification. This resulted in the naming of a plethora of extinct phoci...

New lab paper, this time on phocid limb morphometrics! Lead by former EDDyLab postdoc Dr. Leonard Dewaele, with @narimanechatar.bsky.social, Prof. Mark Uhen, master student Jacques Klassen, and yours truly

anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Interested in the shape variation of phocid long bones? Check out our new study led by Leonard Dewaele in @anatrecord.bsky.social 🦴Using 3DGM, we show that long bones capture variation between subfamilies but fail at species level, calling for caution in fossil taxonomy doi.org/10.1002/ar.7...

Neurodivergent perspectives in geoscience: Reflections from the development of paleontology museum educational materials As neurodivergent paleontologists, museum practitioners, and allies, we recognize that the museum world is not always welcoming to neurodivergent needs and perspectives. Science museums have made a...

Check out this new JGE paper by Kobayashi et al. (Including @taorminalepore.bsky.social, I'm not sure if others are on bsky)

Neurodivergent perspectives in geoscience: Reflections from the development of paleontology museum educational materials

⚒️🧪

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

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Our new paper on how pinniped (seal and sea lion) brains evolved to unlock vocal plasticity is this week's @science.org cover.

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

Adapted from Axelsson et al. 2013 Fig 2c: Histogram showing the distribution of diploid amylase copy number in wolf (n=35, blue) and dog (n=136, red). Dogs carry more copies of the starch-digesting gene AMY2B than wolves. Additional copies make dogs better than wolves at digesting starchy foods like grains & vegetables.

Dogs evolved to eat your leftovers! Comparing dog & wolf genomes revealed dogs have up to 30 EXTRA copies of the amylase gene (AMY2B) that helps digest starch. This is a key genomic signature of living alongside humans & table scraps for thousands of years 🐕 www.nature.com/articles/nat... #2026MMM

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

They found him. He died.

Another murder by our immigration goon squads

A book wrapped in heart-shape patterned wrapping paper, with the words “fossil hunter”, “autobiography “, and “paleontology” on the front.

The inside cover of a book called “From Siberian Prisoner to Dinosaur Egg Detective”, edited by Thomas Holtz

Our BioSci library did this Valentine’s themed mystery book feature at the front desk, where you can unwrap a secret valentine book to check out if the keywords catch your eye. I couldn’t resist this one, which seems to be edited by none other than @arctomet.bsky.social!

The fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox) is what arrives when you order a puma off of Wish.

They're the largest apex predator on Madagascar, where they act to control the local lemur population.

They're the 'big cat' equivalent in family Eupleridae, which is a sister taxon to the mongoose family.

Well in the case of a crap paper maybe ‘drop’ is the correct verb 😂

(PDF) Women from the Americas and Their Contribution to Fish Paleontology PDF | Paleontological studies have traditionally been conducted by male researchers, and the study of fossil fishes, as well as extant ones, has been no... | Find, read and cite all the research you n...

Humbled to see my work and opinion included in this study, alongside some of the best female paleoichthyologists across continents. Our resilience is written in the fossil record 💪🐟🐠🐡

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Locomotive implication of a Pliocene three-toed horse skeleton from Tibet and its paleo-altimetry significance | PNAS The Tibetan Plateau is the youngest and highest plateau on Earth, and its elevation reaches one-third of the height of the troposphere, with profou...

Happy Lunar New Year! Before the fire horse, there was the ‘high horse’: our team’s closest encounter with this year’s zodiac animal was studying one of the highest elevation three-toed horse fossils back in 2012. #LunarNewYear #丙午马年

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

SVP Diversity Committee co-chair here. Feel free to dm me your thoughts. I’m working with DivComm and some other committees on an action plan and I’d love to know what you want to happen and what would make you feel safer, reassured, and welcome.

(1) Long 🧵 Time.
Today we learned that paleontologist Jack Horner (the same guy who helped give us "Jurassic Park") is in the Epstein Files. As a paleontologist, I feel compelled to say something because this touches my field and I want to make my stance clear on this...

The flounder effect: disparities in taxonomic and ecological study intensity across extant and fossil marine organisms hamper conservation - npj Biodiversity npj Biodiversity - The flounder effect: disparities in taxonomic and ecological study intensity across extant and fossil marine organisms hamper conservation

New paper out:

The flounder effect: disparities in taxonomic and ecological study intensity across extant and fossil marine organisms hamper conservation

with @fossildetective.bsky.social, @bigfacecats.bsky.social, Curtis Congreve & @jonhendricks.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44... 🦑⚒️

Academics vying for a spot in Epstein‘s world. There are so many. I feel the need to make a thread, so I don’t keep confusing them. 1/

I‘ve been a woman in paleontology far too long to be surprised by this shit.

Stella Carlson is a face painter & children's entertainer.

She's also an American hero.

If you can, watch the entire CNN segment.

It made me cry to see such a courageous & eloquent patriot.

Do your part:
Call Congress & tell them to ABOLISH ICE! 19% of even Republicans agree.

202-224-3121

If you’re interested in extinction risk, please check out our new paper in @science.org led by my former PhD student Cooper: www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Mummified cave cheetahs inform rewilding actions in Saudi Arabia - Communications Earth & Environment Naturally mummified cheetah remains in a Saudi Arabian cave system with radiocarbon-calibrated ages between about 4,200 and 100 years cluster with Asian as well as West-African sub-species, with impli...

fascinating specimens with exciting implications for the conservation of the critically endangered asiatic cheetah! www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Come check out back-to-back Law lab talks today in the Shape and Climate session (room B112)!

10:15am - Long fuse evolution of carnivoran skeletal phenomes
13:30am - Endocranial shape variation in relation to climate in primates

#SICB2026 @sicb-dcb-dvm.bsky.social

Time to publish responsibly: DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology Abstract. The current economics of scientific publishing reveal a profound imbalance: academia pays prices far exceeding the actual costs of publication. R

Academia friendly peer-reviewed journals in EEB: academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

A classroom with orange chairs clustered somewhat out of order.

It’s a wrap for my vertebrate morphology class. Students surveyed the vertebrate fossil record, functional anatomy, phylogenetic comparative methods, geometric morphometrics, scientific writing, + more! A doubly meaningful experience for me because I took this class as an undergrad 24 years ago! 💙💛🐻

Our reviewed preprint @elife.bsky.social: Brawn before bite in endemic Asian mammals after the end-Cretaceous extinction doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

The research team will undertake revisions based on the initial reviews to further strengthen the evidence underlying our work! #paleontology #mammals