Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
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brpetrucci.bsky.social
Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
@brpetrucci.bsky.social
🇧🇷 Computational paleobiology, macroevolution, Bayesian phylogenetics, and canids 🐶
PhD candidate @ Iowa State University
brpetrucci.github.io
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1/13 Time to talk about dogs and fossilized birth-death models! Here is a quick run-down of my #Evol2025 talk. 🧵
Reposted by Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
I hope to take a PhD student in 2026 to study siphonophores. Please reach out if you are interested in applying this fall. For examples of recent lab projects see www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... and academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...
August 28, 2025 at 12:45 PM
Reposted by Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
Once upon a time, large bone-crushing dogs roamed across our continent. @restingdinoface.bsky.social takes a colorful look back at the lives of the successful carnivores. www.smithsonianmag.com/science-natu...
What Happened to the Bone-Crushing Dogs That Once Hunted Across North America?
Before going extinct roughly two million years ago, canids known as borophagines took down and consumed much larger prey
www.smithsonianmag.com
August 4, 2025 at 8:53 PM
Going from reading almost exclusively simulation studies and theory papers to almost exclusively canid systematics/fossil description papers has been an interesting experience!

Anyway look at this cool paper about Plio-Pleistocene European foxes!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Unraveling the fossil record of foxes: An updated review on the Plio-Pleistocene Vulpes spp. from Europe
Fossil foxes, genus Vulpes, are known since the Late Miocene of North America and the Old World but their record is utterly scarce, fragmentary, and r…
www.sciencedirect.com
July 30, 2025 at 11:18 PM
They're listening to my private conversations somehow, I'm certain of it.

Holy crap I'm excited 🤩
AMAZING NEWS!
apple tv has just announced a NEW pleistocene-focused series of #prehistoricplanet! streaming on november 26th
July 29, 2025 at 5:32 PM
Reposted by Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
Updated preprint! Thanks to suggestions from reviewers, we have some new insights on using continuous traits in phylogenetic estimation.

And a lot more about dicynodont taxonomy. Seriously, google dicynodonts and tell me you don't want to know what's happening there

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Incorporating continuous characters in joint estimation of dicynodont phylogeny
Continuous characters have received comparatively little attention in Bayesian phylogenetic estimation. This is predominantly because they cannot be modeled by a standard phylogenetic Q-matrix approac...
www.biorxiv.org
July 15, 2025 at 12:15 PM
Reposted by Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
here are some space fireworks, happy 4th of july 🎆🌌
July 4, 2025 at 6:19 PM
Reposted by Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
We’re hiring! Join us at maraujo lab as a #PhD candidate to model species abundances using cutting-edge ecological and statistical tools. Based at @mncn-csic.bsky.social @mncn-bgcg.bsky.social and @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social.
🔗 www.maraujolab.eu/2025/07/04/p...
#SpeciesDistributionModels
PhD candidate in species abundances modelling -
Project Description Understanding species abundance patterns is essential to addressing fundamental questions in macroecology and biogeography, specifically about […]
www.maraujolab.eu
July 4, 2025 at 4:36 PM
Having to write an R script to write another script makes me feel like I am in limbo
July 3, 2025 at 7:14 PM
Reposted by Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.
June 19, 2025 at 11:28 AM
Reposted by Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
June 19, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Very cool paper! Glad to see Bluesky helping me find new cool science hot off the press 🍞
June 30, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
🆕 Preprint now on bioRxiv!
We introduce a covarion model for phylogenetic inference using discrete morphological data, addressing lineage- and character-specific rate heterogeneity.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#phylogenetics #morphology #covarion #evolution
A covarion model for phylogenetic estimation using discrete morphological datasets
The rate of evolution of a single morphological character is not homogeneous across the phylogeny and this rate heterogeneity varies between morphological characters. However, traditional models of mo...
www.biorxiv.org
June 27, 2025 at 1:27 PM
Reposted by Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
#MolluscMonday Ordovician orthoconic nautiloid in a paving stone at Hampton Court Palace. The section intersects the siphuncular tube on the right hand-side just below the living chamber.
June 30, 2025 at 4:22 AM
Reposted by Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
Excellent analysis & commentary by @johnhawks.net on 2024 study of 1.5 mya fossil hominin footprints in Kenya showing 2 different species of humans (Homo erectus & Paranthropus boisei) walking in the same direction, & possibly separated by only a few hours. Ichnology FTW! 🧪🐾🪨
My look at the most recent science of footprint analysis for ancient human relatives. An extraordinary case from the ancient shores of Lake Turkana, revealing trackways by two species, Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei, made within a short time.

www.johnhawks.net/p/when-homin...
Footprints of two hominin species hours apart on the same shoreline
A new study by Kevin Hatala and coworkers finds that Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei walked on the same shores within hours of each other.
www.johnhawks.net
May 22, 2025 at 1:59 PM
For those who followed me without knowing me (thank you and nice to meet you!), it’s very important for you to know that I am unhealthily obsessed with horseshoe crabs.

I don’t even study them at all, and they’ve just been my favorite animal since I found out they existed. They’re the coolest!
Just a horseshoe crab doing its thing. Its thing is heading back to the water after a volunteer rescued it from being stuck on its back and left behind by the tide. 😅 I love the scraping noise they make as they move along the sand.

#invertebrates 🦀 🌿
June 30, 2025 at 1:52 AM
1/13 Time to talk about dogs and fossilized birth-death models! Here is a quick run-down of my #Evol2025 talk. 🧵
June 27, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Thank you so much to all the new and old friends I had the pleasure of speaking to at #Evol2025. Hope I can establish lots of new collaborations and, even more importantly, new connections with these talented folks. See y’all in Cleveland!!
June 25, 2025 at 3:07 PM
Reposted by Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
A horseshoe crab and its final footprints preserved in 149.4 million year old limestone from Solnhofen, Germany 😢

On display in the Bürgermeister-Müller-Museum #fossils #FossilFriday #geology ⚒️🧪
October 11, 2024 at 12:09 PM
Reposted by Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
It’s the last day of Evolution 2025! We hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have.

The Super Social is tonight at the State Botanical Gardens! See you there? 🎉

#Evol2025 @sse-evolution.bsky.social @systbiol.bsky.social @asn-amnat.bsky.social
June 24, 2025 at 1:13 PM
Lots of cool talks happening in a few hours for the last sessions of #Evol2025!

Nicolás Castillo Rodríguez from @roszenil.bsky.social’s group will be talking about the evolution of Bromeliaceae in sky island systems (Phylogenetic Comparative Methods, Olympia 1, 4pm)
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June 24, 2025 at 6:46 PM
🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷
Brazilians at #Evol2025!
🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷

Creature comforts is closed today, so I’ll take that opportunity to rectify my mistake of scheduling something at the same time as the SSB mixer and say let’s just meet there! Little King's Shuffle Club:

maps.app.goo.gl/M6qsf1q9kRQE...
June 23, 2025 at 11:41 PM
Reposted by Bruno do Rosario Petrucci
Last but not least, I will be sharing some work on a model I have been developing for chromosome evolution today! Be there or be square! I'll be presenting at 4:45 in Phylogenetic Theory! #Evol2025
June 23, 2025 at 11:58 AM
My talk might be done, but if you’re still looking for cool talks at #Evol2025, come watch Isabel Novick talk about the population genetics of webbing clothes moths at 4:30pm in Biogeography III (Athena CD)!!
June 23, 2025 at 3:22 PM
Thank you so much for everyone who came to my #Evol2025 talk! For those who couldn’t make it, I’m planning to upload it to my website and make a little thread here about the work, so stay tuned 🐕
June 23, 2025 at 2:26 PM
Ok I just realized the SSB mixer is also tomorrow at 7:30pm sooooo I guess the answer is bar hop???
Brazilians at #Evol2025! @mjanuario.bsky.social and I are planning ab informal meetup tomorrow after the poster session (~7:30pm) at Creature comforts, a brewery 10 min from the conference center. Non-Brazilians who want to mingle and hear some Portuguese are always welcome!! 🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷
June 22, 2025 at 9:34 PM