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Happy #NationalFossilDay from the Department of Invertebrate Paleontology at the Sam Noble Museum! ⛏️

Please share with interested grad school applicants!

New paper from Smithsonian NMNH & Sam Noble Museum researchers about starfish evolution during the Age of Dinosaurs peerj.com/articles/18169/

Love to find the doors to our fossil invertebrate collections decorated for the holidays. Very cool biodiversity-themed tree and paper stockings for our awesome students and volunteers!

Reminder I'm recruiting a graduate student to join the Paleobiology Research Group at OU lab in fall '25. My lab uses fossils, fieldwork, & statistical phylogenetic methods to study macroevolutionary processes in marine invertebrates, especially echinoderms. Please share & feel free to reach out!

Congratulations to the fall 2024 graduates!

In light of the Saurophaganax situation (🦕vs🦖), I suggest we consider Oklahomacystis as the state fossil. Oklahomacystis belongs to the Paracrinoidea, an extinct lineage of rare & unusual blastozoan echinoderms. Despite their name, they aren't very closely related to crinoids.

🚨Very excited to share this new preprint! "Assessing the impact of character evolution models on phylogenetic and macroevolutionary inferences from fossil data" biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

New preprint of a study led by Dr. Davey F. Wright ⛏️🦕🧬 with Melanie Hopkins (AMNH). What's it about? The answer is in the title! What did they find? Inferences from fossils & morphologic data cannot be made in a vacuum, but "...a place where all the different kinds of truths fit together

Happy New Year from the OU Paleobiology Group!

Congratulations to OU Geosciences graduate students Kiera Crowley (Wright lab) and Alysha Zazubec (Cole lab) for receiving Paleontological Society Student Research Grants!

Congratulations to Kiera Crowley (Wright lab) for receiving this year's Outstanding Graduate Teaching Associate Award from OU Geosciences!

Although fossils from nearly all major intervals of the Phanerozoic can be found in Oklahoma, it's a veritable Paleozoic paradise at the Sam Noble Museum #FossilFriday

Congratulations to OU Paleobiology graduate students Kiera Crowley (Wright lab) and Nicolas Bell (Cole lab) for successfully defending their graduate research proposals to their committees this week! Well done!

Very excited to have Melanie Hopkins, trilobite paleontologist extraordinaire and Curator & Chair of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, and her student Gabe visit our collections here at the Sam Noble Museum! #TrilobiteTuesday

The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History has an absolutely spectacular collection of fossil crinoids, including these beautiful late Paleozoic eucladids #FossilFriday

"The fossil record effectively provides a set of natural experiments...by studying these events, we gain insights into how ecosystems respond when pushed past their breaking points, which has direct implications for understanding biodiversity loss today." ou.edu/news/articles/…

New paper! "Phylogeny and macroevolution of a “dead clade walking”: a systematic revision of the Paragaricocrinidae (Crinoidea)" cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Ancient catastrophes could provide keys to climate future "The future is what we put in it now," Wright said. “We can make comparisons with what we know has happened...and use our knowledge of history as a baseline for what could happen in the future." normantranscript.com/news/ancient-c…

Happy to be working these jaw dropping beautifully preserved fossil echinoderms on #FossilFriday