Mark Wright

Very pleased to see this paper out in print, written with @chistinesd.bsky.social The deep-time history of soils and plants www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Happy to share our new Science Advances @science.org paper on ~250 Myr of crocodile-line archosaur macroevolution and climate! 🐊☄️ #croctober 🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Artwork: Davide Bonadonna 🧵 1/6

And be sure to check out this month's Editor's Choice: "The explanatory power of energetic fitness models across living amniotes and extinct non-avian dinosaurs" Stephanie C Lechki & Roger B J Benson doi.org/10.1093/evol...

I wrote up my "it's like finding your hat preference" analogy for MCMC: brianomeara.info/posts/mcmc/ -- it helps students understand burnin, hot and cold chains, RJMCMC, etc. #Teaching #Bayes 🧢 👑 👒 🎩 🪖 🎓

Fat is an efficient energy store, so why don't more animals use it to power vigorous, high-intensity aerobic activity? In their recent Review, Müller and McWilliams examine why this phenomenon seems to be limited to migratory birds, bats and some insects doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

Postdoc opportunity in Vertebrate Evolution at the MCZ and @harvardoeb.bsky.social! The Stephanie Pierce Lab invites proposals spanning any vertebrate group (extinct or extant), any geological time period, and any major evolutionary event or transition. More information at https://bit.ly/47VMBBr

You can submit those records to our map! github.com/BrunaLab/hol...

Just a reminder that certain colors cannot be discriminated by around 5% of the population. Especially in the run-up to the @societyofvertpaleo.bsky.social meeting, think about choosing colorblind-friendly colors for display. There are many resources for this, but colorbrewer2.org is great.

Fossil taxa are sometimes considered island weirdos without any actual evidence that island effects were important in their evolution. So we wrote a paper on how we could do actual island biogeography in deep time. If you want a copy but can't access it, email me: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

good morning. I strongly suspect that we don't really know (or agree) what geographic ranges are, and therefore, our estimates of how species' ranges are shifting in the Anthropocene are uninterpretable. I wrote something about this: doi.org/10.1111/2041... and I'll share the main findings...

Your favorite website for illustrations of almost all organisms is looking for donations to help cover its running costs! Please consider donating to help keep this open-source platform running: www.phylopic.org/images

Divergent expression and conserved function of Alx4 for limb development in amniotes https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13227-026-00275-9 #EvoDevo

Our description of fire amoeba, 𝘐𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘦𝘣𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘴, is now online at Cell! Thanks @oliverio.bsky.social and amazing team for questioning the limits of eukaryotes! 🔥 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

New review of what we know and don't know about the evolutionary history of birds and their close fossil relatives! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 🪶🧪 (📷Benito & @lizzysteell.bsky.social)

Ten years ago Tami, Roy, and I released a movie we made of antibiotic resistance evolving in real time. I thought maybe a couple thousand people tops would see it. I couldn't have imagined it would be seen millions of times, and be taught from middle school through the graduate level worldwide

I would like to point out that the local people in Bolivia were already familiar with the new cat species, traditionally calling it "Tilcayo", a name honored by the scientists who carried it over into the formal scientific name Leopardus tilcayo.

A decade ago, a “weird” kitten was found on a road near a Bolivian forest. Too small to be a housecat, he had a scrunched-up face, short round ears, long whiskers, & a coat of leopard-like spots. DNA analysis now reveals him as the very first of a newly discovered species & I think I'm in love. 😻🧬🧪👇

Some intrepid animals don’t stop fighting for their lives, even after they’ve been eaten. X-ray video from a 2024 study reveals one such daring escape. Learn more: https://scim.ag/4xgpBqX #ScienceMagArchives

Delighted to finally share our paper examining Paleogene mammal faunas and global and regional environmental change in Central Asia.... www.nature.com/articles/s41... @nielsmeijer.bsky.social @sgn.one @idiv-research.bsky.social

This is what a Jurassic forest may have sounded like. By combining exquisitely preserved fossil wings with experiments on living insects, computer simulations, and machine learning, scientists have re-created what they say is a partial Middle Jurassic soundscape. scim.ag/4cirWKy

Astrophotographer Adam (AJ) Smadi caught this image a few hours ago from Washington state. A thin crescent Moon, sunlight illuminating the rugged lunar surface. And 2,400 times farther away—and on the other side of the Sun—mighty Jupiter, and its moons Io (left) and Ganymede (right).

New in PNAS today: we projected how climate change will reshape the body size of marine life across the entire ocean. 23,329 mollusc species, every ocean basin. The headline everyone expects is "life shrinks." The real answer is far stranger. 🧪 #marinelife www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

People who don’t know the difference between ‘entomology’ and ‘etymology’ bug us in ways we cannot put into words.

Online now: The Cambrian fecal revolution: Fueling the Cambrian Radiation

Exhilarated to share a 2nd @science.org cover article this month from our lab @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social! A collaboration with US & Mexico colleagues on the role of a Mexican biogeographic holding pen in shaping the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI)(1/11) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Proud to share our latest paper in out in Nature today on the origin of #snakes. We present Tametara mirim, an articulated 3D preserved stem snake from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil. Tametara helped us re-tell the story of snake origins in a novel way... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What makes this parrot look green? It's more than just a pigment! We found that the color comes from the interaction of pigments, nano- and even microstructures of the feather itself. @jessica-dobson.bsky.social @michaelnicolai.bsky.social @wybouw.bsky.social @lilianadalba.bsky.social.

An analysis of Ediacaran fossils of Spriggina floundersi finds evidence that it was an actively moving, bilaterally symmetrical animal that had a preferred turning direction, making it the oldest described evidence of behavioural handedness. go.nature.com/4fmEXTW #Paleosky 🧪

On this project, my role was VFX producer, and so my main responsibilities revolved around looking after our plethora of prehistoric critters and their worlds, working closely with our amazing friends at Moonraker VFX, who brought it all to life in a gorgeous, vivid way. (4/14)

11. The double descent pattern also occurs if you look at an over-parameterized system's performance with increased training time. Steve suggests that evolutionarily older circuits—that have more evolutionary training, so to speak—are likely to generalize better than recently formed ones.

🧵 Excited to share my final PhD paper in Ecology Letters! A classic question in ecology is why some clades contain more species in local assemblages than others. We argue that part of the answer lies in the timing of speciation itself. doi.org/10.1111/ele....

Field stations are the inspirational lifeblood of many research projects, providing essential facilities and infrastructure, and in our new Perspective series researchers from across the globe tell us about the incredible field stations where they work journals.biologists.com/jeb/collecti...

Nobody: what is a tree, anyway? Us:  authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S... (Review out today, in which we ask whether xylem disconnection arising early in wood anatomy is convergent with disconnection seen across tall plants and whether tree evolution requires disconnection given periodic drought.)

A new Science Advances study led by Sanaa El-Sayed reveals that many modern fish groups were already diversifying in Egypt less than 4Ma after the extinction of the dinosaurs, providing a rare glimpse into the recovery of ancient marine ecosystems. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aec8978

Our paper on turtle origins is finally out in Current Biology, with two major implications for our understanding of reptile evolution 🐢 #Paleontology #Turtles #Evolution www.cell.com/current-biol...

Palaeontologists would love to know how dinosaurs moved, but it's difficult to predict from fossils. @mesozoicmark.bsky.social & Stephanie Pierce looked at the movement of tegu and opossum hips to understand the restrictions caused by skin and muscles around the joint doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

We are hiring! OEB seeks a Curriculum and Pedagogy Manager. Apply using the QR code in image, or visit the OEB website's employment page today! #workatharvard #hiring #employment #pedagogy

Sir David Attenborough 'overwhelmed' by 100th birthday greetings – audio

New paper out on the brain endocast of a distant relative of pangolins: Metacheiromys! We found a possible neurological convergence among myrmecophagous mammals 🧠🐜 Check it out, it's open access! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

My PhD paper on my beloved cycads and beetles on the cover of Science!!! Check out how we studied thermal infrared as a pollination signal, from molecular mechanisms to the wonders of behavior... science.org/doi/10.1126/...