Kai Caspar

🕷️💤 New paper in time for 🎃! Do #spiders really sleep? In our new study on #Portia fimbriata we tested all behavioural criteria of #sleep and found evidence for regulated, two-stage sleep with recurring REM-like stages. Out in @pnas.org! @roesslerdaniela.bsky.social 📄 tinyurl.com/3fky8ze7 🧵1/9

The new corvid decision making study is awesome and important, but its findings require proper contextualization - very helpful thread by @biotay.bsky.social

The hobbit book is finally real and you can preorder it, which feels completely wild. Coming August 2027.

🇧🇷Surucuá-mascarado 🌎Trogon personatus Conservação: Pouco Preocupante O surucuá-mascarado é uma ave da ordem dos Trogoniformes, da família Trogonidae. 📷 Marco Guedes

Ever see a snake do a barrel roll? Scientists disentangle the locomotor kinematics of this behavior in rolling snakes. Learn more in Current Biology: spkl.io/633287ntaA Yosuke Kojima & colleagues @currentbiology.bsky.social

Since I have very little time for drawing at the moment, it would make sense to work on something quick and simple, right? Yeah, nope. This is what my sleep deprived brain decided on. Can you id the species or recognize where in the world these species live?

Bumblebees prefer shorter over longer strings and connected over disconnected ones in string‐pulling tasks but prioritize connectivity over spatial proximity when the two are in conflict - Wen - 2026 - Insect Science - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

I had a wonderful time this week at the Marine Reptile Conference at Oxford. Lots of fun chatting about ongoing croc work, and super proud to see Max who I co-supervised present on his master’s project 👏🐊 Huge thanks to all the organisers for making this conference happen! #FossilFriday

Our paper on how orangutan mothers plan and alter their space use at personal costs so their offspring may play with similarly aged offspring (independent of kinship and fruit productivity) has transitioned from preprint to peer reviewed publication doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Got some exciting new mosasaur research out today in Current Biology! How fast could these predators burst? www.cell.com/current-biol...

For years, 💀MorphoSource💀 has given researchers, educators, and students 🚨free access🚨 to 3D data on museum specimens from around the world. 🔆Now it is asking for some help to continue its work🔆 www.morphosource.org/donate/

PhyloPic is having an October fundraiser. The goal is to raise enough money to cover web hosting for the past six months. Please share the link, and chip in a bit if you can! www.phylopic.org

Speedpainting of Miophyseter gunmaensis, a new species of physeteroid described from Japan. The specimen consists of a nearly complete skeleton of a young individual, with an estimated length of 3 to 4 m. It lived approximately 16 to 14 million years ago. #paleoart

We have made a user-friendly python package `envisionboxbio-apetrack` that combines several tools (Owlv2, ByteTrack, OpenApePose) to track multiple apes without any labeling or finetuning. Check it out: `pip install envisionboxbio-apetrack` github.com/WimPouw/envi...

This is super important, because Westlothiana, as the (formerly) oldest crown tetrapod, had been used for molecular divergence estimates of Tetrapoda, and (mistakenly) for Reptilia by some studies.

🌊🐊 Were some of the earliest crocodylians venturing into the sea? 🦴 For our new paper in Palaeontology, we CT-scanned three skulls of “thoracosaurs” and found clues for a shallow-marine lifestyle in these enigmatic critters. ➡ doi.org/10.1111/pala... ️📖

New research finds the Suriname toad’s strange star-shaped fingertips are a kind of tactile eyeball that allow them to ‘see’ their prey. The toes detect subtle vibrations in the water and translate them into details about size and speed. #ToadToesTuesday 🧪🧪 New at @science.org

This was a fantastic team effort across 30+ labs 🌍 Paper (open access), data & code all public. > 📄 doi.org/10.1111/desc... > 💻 github.com/manybabies/m... > #ManyBabies #InfantCognition #OpenScience #DevSci, lead team: Andreea Geambaşu, Melanie Soderstrom, and Claartje Levelt

Xenorhinotherium & Macrauchenia my beloveds This was mostly an exercise in achieving different fur textures in Blender, as well as an excuse to make an infographic since I haven't made one of those in a while. #SciArt #artbyjulio

How do orangutans build their huge diet profiles before adulthood? @revathe.bsky.social and colleagues show, for the first time, how multiple forms of learning interact over many years to build broad, survival-relevant ecological skills in a wild great ape. Paper: doi.org/10.1126/scie...

For the record: The @mammalbiology.bsky.social anniversary meeting in Berlin last week has been an amazing experience but I simply cannot do it justice here. Incredibly proud to be part of this community.

In Frankfurt today for a collection visit - and the Messel exhibition is promoted by perhaps the most attractive Gastornis reconstruction I've seen so far.

🦇 Bat1K's biggest paper yet is out. Largest bat genome + fossil study ever: 103 genomes, 44 fossils, 137 researchers. We rewrote the bat family tree! Bats likely originated in Europe ~65 million years ago, not Asia, Africa or Americas. @bat1kgenomes.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-11007-3

🦎Wall lizards! 💆Enrichment! 😨Corticosterone! ☺️Welfare! Our #EditorsChoice for the #AnimalBehaviourJournal: "Ethologically informed enrichment improves behavioural and physiological indicators of welfare in a captive lizard" Read at doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2026.123692

After 20 years of research, scientists have formally described Mus dumbara, a new spiny mouse species endemic to Sri Lanka’s Knuckles Mountain Range. First lured by burnt coconut in 2004, the elusive rodent highlights the island's overlooked small-mammal biodiversity. Story by Malaka Rodrigo.

So, what distinguishes one reptilian pallium from another may be the lineage-specific modulation of a conserved transcriptional program. Building a neocortex may therefore have had more to do with re-using an ancient blueprint.

Jiménez S., Moreno-Cerdá A., Moreno-Bravo J.-A., Moreno N. y García-Moreno F. (2026). Divergent structural trajectories for pallial regionalization within reptiles reveal conserved evolutionary blueprints. Cerebral Cortex 36(9): bhag131 🫶🏻 👉🏽 t.co/RtU0ninn3H

According to my editor, a document that holds about nine years of my life, pondering a very small human who died on an island a long time ago, is final (minus the copyedits). ✍️📚💀

#SciArtSeptember 7: Fawn Xenokeryx amidalae, a strange species of ruminant that inhabited what is today Spain, some 15 million years ago. Miocene was a time of wonders. #SciArt

One of the most beautiful of all mammals, to me at least - Goodfellow's tree kangaroo from Papua New Guinea. Photo taken last week at Rostock Zoo. 🧪🦘

Attending the keynote talk of assistant prof Isabel Damas Moreira, University of Bielefeld, bridging lizard behaviour with antrophogenically influenced landscapes. Learning so many cool facts about lizards🦎 @dzg-behaviour.bsky.social

'In some respects, what we are seeing resembles a form of collective grief. Not only grief for colleagues who have left, but grief for ways of working, professional identities and communities that once gave meaning to academic life. This creates an important challenge for university leaders.'

Evidence from Bianfu Cave shows specialized hunting, expedient stone-tool production and extensive bone use of Denisovans, providing new insights into their ecology, behaviour and cultural legacy in eastern Asia, according to a paper in Nature. go.nature.com/3SFqhrY 🏺🧪

I do want to point out: from all we know, these papers (and the people behind them) agree on most relevant points. What makes this topic so exhausting are not different views on noisy data but needless personal attacks fragmenting an already tiny field. Very tired and glad to move on from this ...

Für seine herausragenden Beiträge zum Verständnis der Evolution von Gehirn und Kognition wird Prof. Dr. Onur Güntürkün von der @dzg-gerzoolsociety.bsky.social ausgezeichnet.

Lots of new dinocephalian data here in this excellent paper, including possible soft tissues of the brain of Moschops anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Female pileated gibbon enjoying some cooked meat at Zoo Schwerin.

How fast can mice learn complex mazes? With @mameister4.bsky.social we reveal memory, generalization, latent learning, and remote credit assignment of mice in the Manhattan Maze. Do mice born without a cortex or hippocampus have them too? Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Trogontherium cuvieri by the sunset, Middle Pleistocene, Carpathian lowland

Soon ... @themanybirds.bsky.social

#ECBB2026 Megan Lambert delivering the second keynote of curiosity-like behaviours in animals, Animal Curiosity: context, causes, and consequences. (Possibly also getting the unofficial award for best videos of the morning?)

#ECBB2026 Why is neophobia important? Well @drrmiller.bsky.social shares this and more in the second talk focusing on curiosity-like behaviour in animals!

We got a new preprint in the wild. ​The Miocene was warm; the Miocene had high CO2, so how come the Miocene had huge coral reefs? By dialing in reefs' temperatures and modeling their carbon system, we think we have an answer. 🧪🌊⚒️ Link: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-10804107/v1​

ManyDogs wants to know what YOU want to know about dogs! 🤔 Take our quick, 10-minute survey to help guide our future studies. 📝 And please share with dog lovers near and far! 🐩🐕🐕‍🦺 #Dogs #DogResearch #DogScience #CanineResearch #CanineScience

Next week, EvOCRO heads to Cambridge for #ECBB2026! Prof. Claudia Wascher and Francesca are part of the Core Organising Group, while Francesca and Prof. Anna Wilkinson are organising a symposium on reptile and amphibian behaviour. www.aru.ac.uk/events/confe...

Musically inclined mice inflate their throats like balloons to sing their whistling tunes. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/singing-mice-air-throat-sacs-songs

Tihelka, E., Vásquez, C., Engel, M.S. et al. Amphibious stem-insect sheds light on colonization of land. Nature (2026). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

I was lucky enough to see endangered turtles hatch from their eggs and make their trip to the sea yesterday. The large swarm of humans scared off any potential predators. It wasn’t nearly as dramatic as in the documentaries