Matt Friedman

Happy 10th anniversary of the UM CTEES facility! Here's a younger me loading the first sample on that fateful day.

🍁 ICVM2027 Logo Competition – Winner Announced! 🎉 Congratulations to Nikhil Kumar Rai, whose design, combining vertebrate skeletons, the Canadian maple leaf, and Atlantic waves, has been selected as the official ICVM2027 logo! See you in Halifax, 20–24 July 2027! #ICVM2027 #ISVM #Morphology

SICB's job share: San Francisco State University: Funded Master’s #Research Opportunity — #Evolution, Development, and Deep #Homology of Fins and Limbs Interested in how evolution generates new forms? see our#SICB job board sicb.org/jobs-and-fel... #fish #biology #amhiring

New Middle Jurassic species of Sauropsis Agassiz, 1832 and revision of the Early Jurassic ‘Sauropsis’ veruinalis White, 1925, with an updated systematic classification of Pachycormiformes (Actinopterygii, Teleosteomorpha). Read here: buff.ly/5ZmAgzP #PaleoSky #OxfordClay #phylogeny #stem-teleosts

This is the appropriate way to react if you come across a fossil fish.

How does manipulation of abiotic habitat by animals — known as #ecosystem engineering — affect their evolution and diversification: A wide-ranging deep-digging review by Simon Darroch & a large team! www.cell.com/current-biol...

Interested in sharks, fossils, or biomechanics? We're advertising a competitively funded @centa.bsky.social PhD at the Uni. of Birmingham, with the NHM, looking at form and function in living and extinct shark jaws🦈 More details here centa.ac.uk/studentship/..., please email me with any questions.

Three years ago, my dad said that all fish are the same shape. Out of spite, I decided to draw all 478 families of bony fish listed in Nelson 2016. There's still some stuff I need to edit and some fish I want to redraw but, after 985 days, I finished my big dumb fish project last night.

Running the exam for EARTH 437: Vertebrate Paleontology today, so no collections for me. Instead, here's the subject of a specimen-based question: Amphiperca from the Eocene of Messel. (Fish lectures are done, so back to the collection next week!)

The @burkemuseum.bsky.social is offering funds to support graduate and postdoctoral research visits to the collections, including our University of Washington Herbarium! Please help us get the word out! More information is available here: www.burkemuseum.org/collections-...

Exciting news!! I'm chairing the search in my department @lsubiosci.bsky.social for an **Endowed Chair in Lichenology**! The candidate should be tenured (or equivalent), and have a documented track record in excellent in collections-based lichen research. lsu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/LSU/jo...

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨 🗓️29th October 2026, 15:00 UTC🗓️ Next Thursday, @basantakhakurel.bsky.social from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München will talk about “Accounting for Rate Heterotachy in Morphological Phylogenetics: An overview in RevBayes”. Sign up: palaeoverse.org/training/lec...

Acanthostega, the fishapod with 8 digits #tetrapods #sarcopterygian #Devonian #oilpainting #vertebrate #evolution #macroevolution

Hey, I know her!

Pycnodonts are horrendously understudied. Just look at these things!

#SundayFishSketch 🐠🐟And the series is now complete! Here is a selection of 21 pycnodont fish, showing their diversity through time Species in the Alt text #paleoart

#Artober day 6 - fish (Giant snakehead) #art #stars #celestial

Playing by their own rules: clade-specific trends in mandibular form and function disrupt current paradigms of early tetrapod evolution https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.15.759488v1

I figured I would make a PSA since NSF GRFPs are due soon. Make sure to follow all the formatting requirements exactly as written, and have "Intellectual Merit" and "Broader Impacts" on their own separate lines. I'd hate for anyone to get auto-rejected! www.nsf.gov/funding/init...

what a nice visit from @ehmee.bsky.social, shown here with a particularly @friedmanlab.bsky.social- coded slide from her fantastic talk

Paleobotanists, come be our colleague at the wonderful Yale Peabody Museum! apply.interfolio.com/194803

does the Guardians season continue?

Just a reminder...🐟 Art by our own Ray Troll.

Neil Landman, Curator Emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, reflects on his journey into paleontology, the aesthetic beauty and biology of #ammonites, and his groundbreaking research on post-impact survival near the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction boundary.

My first scientific illustration featured in a publication! Congrats to Jack on the new paper, it was a pleasure working with you to reconstruct this impressive fish.

A portion of the late-surviving osteostracan Escuminaspis from the Late Devonian of Miguasha (UMMP VP 110611) for #FossilFriday.

🧬🌿 Morphological Phylogenetics Workshop | IOE, UK 🌿 Join us on 9–11 November 2026. 🎓 Student travel bursaries available! 📝 Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... 🔗 More info: systass.org/morphologica... #workshop #morphology #phylogenetics

I was exposed to Paleozoic ray-finned fishes and it affected me for life.

Teaching on campus, so no collections visit. Instead enjoy some actinopterygians for today's lab for EARTH 437: Vertebrate Paleontology.

It's occurred to me just how much donated time and specimen material I've participated in for the Sternberg Museum. This project from 2009 started with a call for some excavation assistance and resulted in a new genus of fish

Today our paper introducing Megacauda is published in Nature! Which means I can finally share my illustration! Meet this beautifully preserved Jurassic, semi-aquatic swimmer #sciart #paleontology

Hot off the presses! I reviewed the history of early ray-finned fishes, with a focus on their morphology, fossil record, and taxonomy. My principal goal is a guide for other workers to make the rich record of early actinopterygian evolution more broadly available. dx.doi.org/10.1002/jmor...

New paper on some very large ray-finned fish fossils! Thank you to Elizabeth Furman this awesome illustration. TLDR: Large early ray-finned fishes are rare, but show very different morphologies to the point that big body size is associated with distinct ecomorphologies. mapress.com/zt/article/v...

I’m really happy to share that my invited review on social insect genome evolution, co-authored with @corriemoreau.bsky.social, is out now in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social 🐝🐜 This is the paper I wish I’d had when studying for quals in grad school, and was a ton of fun to write.

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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...

Variety pack of eurypterids at UMMNH for #FossilFriday: Acutiramus (UMMP IP 86635), Paracarcinosoma (UMMP IP 62598), Eurypterus (UMMP IP 7157), and Dolichopterus (UMMP IP 62680). All from the Silurian of New York and Ontario.

A bird’s eye view of the fossil record: perspectives on avian systematics by Benito & Steell. Read here: buff.ly/fJattSx This is the latest article in our collection of agenda-setting reviews in the systematics of major fossil groups - with many more articles coming soon! #FossilFriday

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.

I am looking for graduate students to join my lab in Fall 2027. If your interests lie within the realms of phylogenetics, macroevolution, and/or invertebrate biodiversity please reach out to me!!

Teaching on the main campus so no collections work today. So here's Bothriolepis canadensis (UMMP VP 3475) from this week's lab for the vertebrate paleontology course.

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