Always cool when our team's work finds a new audience—such as being featured in a magazine for kids with hearing loss. It's hard to imagine better hearing than in owls—crazy cochleae & asymmetrical external ears! 🦉 Also cool to be paired with acclaimed author Jennifer Ackerman!

First #RandomActofAnatomy video in ages! Check out the remarkable feet of owls! Not only are they fully feathered & bear sharp talons, but they can rotate their 4th toe from front to back for added behavioral flexibility in walking vs. prey capture. 🦉 youtu.be/cH6jO_yUZes

🚨 New paper on #dinosaur #brain evolution & development in Nature Communications 🚨 Pleased to be part of the study led by Logan King showing theropods & ornithischians shared a "dino-wide" brain shape scaling trend different from modern birds and alligators. nature.com/articles/s4146…

Happy #SkeletonSaturday, #SeabirdSaturday, #SquamateSaturday, #SeaturtleSaturday, & #Caturday. Accessioning some of the summer's effort into the OUVC collection. All major amniote groups—3 mammals, 1 lizard, 1 turtle, 5 crocs, & 8 birds. Thx to all the @OhioU students who helped!

#RandomActofAnatomy Happy #LaborDay to those in the US, & as a "labor of love" I popped into the lab to continue the process of processing skeletons. Before I put everything away, I blasted off a video running through the specimens laid out on the tables. youtu.be/_H1mgppbWRw?si…

Why did mammals and birds both evolve huge brains? Mathias Osvath, Pavel Nemec WitmerLab & me propose a new theory, centered on endothermy. Warm bloodedness requires more food, which requires more smarts to find it. In other words: thought for food! sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

New #OA article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by our Deep Time Cognition team—Mathias Osvath, Pavel Němec, Steve Brusatte, & myself (+ our teams!)—that offers a new-ish hypothesis & sets the stage for our ongoing collaborative work. 🧠🦖🦎🐦‍⬛🐊🐢 sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Grace Vance, an OHIO Honors Program research undergrad in our lab, was featured in a @OhioU article on summer student internships (bit.ly/4giSEmx). Grace had a highly competitive & prestigious #DAADRISE internship to work with seals in Germany!

Manatees! These amazing specimens (an adult & a youngster) sadly were killed by speedboats in Florida & were then legally donated to our research. Getting them ready today for CT scanning tomorrow with Grace Vance, our resident marine mammal researcher & OHIO Honors Program undergrad.

This is a shoe-in for the weirdest scan! So, today Grace Vance, Joey McManus, & I were scanning the body of an alligator (OUVC 9761) to go along with the head we'd scanned & skeletonized earlier. Strange object in its belly turned out to be the sole of a shoe or a boot! 🤪🐊👢

Thanks to Ryan Ridgely, we've got all 3 datasets for this shoe-eating alligator assembled—as well as the shoe itself. Coincidentally, I provided 3D viz of this exact specimen (OUVC 9761) to CBS for a 2011 episode of CSI Miami—where an alligator was the murder weapon! #shoegator🐊