Andy Farke

Welcome, new followers! Here's an introductory post to tell a little about me and what I focus on here. My name is Andy Farke, and I am a vertebrate paleontologist, museum director, high school educator, and homebrewer, among other things (not all at once, of course!).

Etsy MegaThread for truck mainenance, c'td: "DJ T. Rex" glow-in-the-dark enamel #pin! Hey, Mr. DJ - turn it "RAWR!" Numbered limited edition with anodized rainbow metal #pinning #pinlife #enamelpin #crafts #paleoart #art

Two part-time fossil preparator jobs: www.fieldmuseum.org/landing/care...

Well since we're doing this:

Attendee’s reply was “well all of those are manufactured, made in factories” not recognizing that the raw materials came from somewhere, and most raw materials come from the earth somehow. I’m not sure she believed me.

Feels parallel to how “publish or perish” in the humanities has hollowed out the expertise for basic philological projects (critical editions of texts, translations, codicology/paleography, etc)

Fragments train a different kind of expertise: identification under damage, uncertainty and missing context. A clean specimen teaches the name; a weathered one teaches which evidence still earns confidence.

It's #NationalFossilDay in the US! This year the site of interest is White Sands National Park in New Mexico, US, where human footprints document the earliest confirmed record of people in the Americas. Not coincidentally, a new paper on these fossils is just out! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧪

Exclusive: Chronicle Heritage, the largest cultural resources management company in the United States, abruptly announced last week it was shutting down, Science has learned. Learn more: https://scim.ag/3VxYwmb

I posted this last week without comment, but I'm going to comment now. The people who established the system of museums in the West had a very specific reason for doing so: they thought that having an appreciation for the wonders of the world was absolutely necessary for being a good citizen.

Embryos resolve the enigmatic origin of the theropod wishbone | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Checkout this article I found at PLOS: dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Hey, if you're looking to be part of something positive consider helping us get this upcoming book into as many hands as possible. Gorgeous paleoart and good science. It really is a lovely story. Help us support literacy and museums! 🦕🦣🧪📚 (Warning: contains overly-animated paleontologist cameo)

🗺️ The California Geological Survey is hiring 2 positions in our GIS and Publications Unit - a GIS and Publications Supervisor and a GIS Specialist! Spread the world!

Are you going to a conference soon? If you can, please share the network with anyone you think might be interested! We’re trying to bring palaeontologists and conservationists together! You can pop this flyer on one of your Powerpoint slides or print out some copies :)

MorphoSource has a funding drive - if you use this resource, consider supporting! (I just did!)

Vertebrate scavengers prefer to eat the corpses of distantly related species, possibly as adaptive pathogen avoidance? doi.org/10.1111/ele....

That feeling when your iNaturalist observation turns out to be extra extra interesting to some experts in the field...

A thoughtful, excellent write up by @richardconniff.bsky.social on the very sad situation @sternbergpaleo.bsky.social museum #paleontology #palaeontology #naturalhistory richardconniff.substack.com/p/another-na...

Happy #FossilFriday! Specular #fossils of #Brachylophosaurus have been discovered in the #Cretaceous Judith River Formation of #Montana. This is a complete skull (#MOR794) and a section of skin impressions (#MOR1071 8-98-003) from this duck billed #dinosaur.

Hi! My World View in Nature Reviews Biodiversity was published today! Read about my three main aims when educating people about topics in natural history. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Check out this lovely profile of the University of California, Davis’s Peter Wainwright, whose lifelong fascination with fishes inspired a remarkable career in research and teaching. Peter was my postdoc advisor years ago when he was at Florida State University, and is awesome dude and mentor.

" In contrast to body fossil patterns, most mass extinctions, including the end-Permian event, are weakly expressed in the bioerosional ichnogenus record, whereas the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary shows the most pronounced decline." K-Pg event was *bad* bad.

🌿 Neotoma Outreach | Explore Neotoma Data with R 💻 The neotoma2 R package provides an R-based interface to the Neotoma Paleoecology Database, helping researchers retrieve, structure, explore, visualize, and analyze palaeoecological data programmatically. open.neotomadb.org/neotoma2/

📢 Out Now in BoneJ+: Improved 3D skeletonisation performance, on Intel GPUs. Compiler optimisation is back on, giving 🔥 10× 🔥 speedup. Special mention to Windows, whose flakiness exposed buggy behaviour of the unoptimised OpenCL kernel. You *might* have to update your graphics driver 🤷‍♂️

I am pretty disappointed by the lack of public acknowledgment from the American Alliance of Museums about the situations at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel (which was AAM-accredited!) & the Sternberg. There are lots of museum crises right now, but these are particularly serious.

Teacher Resource Day is this Saturday at the Museum! PRI's annual Teacher Resource Day has tables full of free fossil and geological specimens and other educational materials for teachers to use in their classrooms. The event is free and exclusively for teachers. See you there!

Vert paleo curator gig at LSU; see recently published "Vertebrate Fossils of Louisiana" for a preview of the collections and potential projects that can be developed: repository.lsu.edu/spmns/5/

Freimuth WJ, Lively JR, Zanno LE (2026) Reassessment of the Early Cretaceous North American “troodontid” Geminiraptor suarezarum as a therizinosaurian and mosaic evolution of coelurosaurian maxillae. PLoS One 21(9): e0356471. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

This is undramatic, but invaluable, work. How do we know what belongs to which species? - By comparing to the types, the specimens used to describe the species. So where are those types? - Erm can I get back to you, I think someone saw the type of X 50 years ago somewhere in Germany..

🚨Postdoc job alert: Come work with my paleontology & evolution group in Edinburgh! Researcher in Cognitive Evolution Over Deep Time. You'll study how brains & neurons have evolved over time, and predict neuron count in extinct species! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DTC355/p...

Out today: We show that Westlothiana lizziae or "Lizzie," described 35 years ago as the world's oldest reptile - is not a stem amniote at all, but a stem tetrapod. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

With all the news of museums being closed and/or defunded, I feel the message of our paper on the importance of natural history research (and the collections housing those specimens) is just as relevant (or more) today as it was when it was published. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....