🚨 New job alert! 🚨 If you would like to join our lab as a postdoctoral researcher and work with us on unraveling the evolutionary history of #plesiosaurs, please contact me!

I know everyone in the online paleontology community and their mother knows this fossil at this point, but I don't think we appreciate how insane it is that there was an actual, real predator that BIT OFF THE HORNS OF ITS PREY. WHILE IT WAS ALIVE. #FossilFriday

"The boy and the Heron" level nightmare 😳

My boy is back!!! 🥳🥳 #Dinheirosaurus

Another paleo position open: Professor of Practice and Curator in Charge, Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory at UT Austin apply.interfolio.com/175702

Cool, McArthur genius award goes to the Lithuanian expat Ieva Jusionytė. She studies "entanglements between the contemporary state and various modes of violence and wounding." lrt.lt/lituanica/aktu…

"...regional extinction rate [through K-Pg Event] of between 75 and 84% for squamates in the Western Interior of North America and suggests this group was more severely impacted across the K/Pg boundary than other small-bodied vertebrates." royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs…

Vilnius is here in Lithuania, but also there is Wilno (Polish name for Vilnius) in Minnesota, USA

Oh Svyatoslav Igorevich (son of Igor, and St. Olga of Kiev for that matter) — destroyer of empires. Know from his saying: "I'm going on You".

I've read long-ago, that a very innovative paleobiologist Steven Stanley had late diagnosed ADHD. While bored sitting on the funeral, he devised a concept of species selection, while thinking about the punctuated equilibria theory put forward by N. Eldredge and S. J. Gould.

We, as scientists, should think about how to best use this resource to understand the world. For example high-altitude cold climate mammalian carcass biostratinomy and taphonomy with many natural experiments anyone?

Interesting if the approach applied to the fossils could recover even more speciation dominance in accumulation of the divergence. Neontological phylogenies can certainly overestimate anagenesis, since many speciation events can be "masked" in sister branches. cc: ignacio quintero

Such a charismatic Tom

👏

This is Tian Shan and high Andes Mountains scale, taking on average

Cool to discover, that new living fossils. One example is Hula painted frog nature.com/articles/ncomm… , which is endemic to one lake in Israel and it diverge from sister in the Paleogene Apparently new (extinct) species is found in early Pleistocene of Italy tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

It's crazy to think, that while heading toward 9 billion people on Earth, we ere still undescribed (and know nothing about) hundreds to maybe thousand mammalian species: academic.oup.com/jmammal/advanc… "projections of ∼7,079 species by 2030 and ∼8,376 by 2050 if these trends continue"

Sounds like one more case of complexity science, resonating with the Darwinian mechanisms of clade heclade displacement, "the double wedge", Red Queen and so on. CC: Sergi Valverde🌍(under a blue sky) Blai Vidiella Niles Eldredge