Dr. Oliver Demuth
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oliverdemuth.bsky.social
Dr. Oliver Demuth
@oliverdemuth.bsky.social
390 followers 230 following 26 posts
Evolutionary biomechanist & functional morphologist interested in how living and dead things move | Junior Research Fellow - Earth Sciences at Clare College | Professional Scientific Illustrator | PhD Cambridge | MSc Bristol | BA ZHdK | 🇨🇭 in 🇬🇧
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oliverdemuth.bsky.social
Dr. Oliver Demuth @oliverdemuth.bsky.social · Nov 15
Let's see if the pastures are greener over here...
Hi everyone I'm Oliver and I'm new here! I am a scientific illustrator and evolutionary biomechanist. I currently study the evolution of bird flight and I also draw and paint dead things ☠🦖🐦. Expect #PaleoArt / #SciArt, #Science and #Fossils!
oliverdemuth.bsky.social
🚨 Job position @cam.ac.uk 🚨

Project Coordinator for 5 years at 0.5 FTE on the ERC Funded STEPS project. Closing date for application 2nd January 2026, interviews ~3 weeks later!

Apply here: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/project...

@cam-archaeology.bsky.social
@erc.europa.eu
Project Coordinator (Part Time, Fixed Term)
The post holder will work as part of the ERC Starting Grant project STEPS: Biomechanical simulations of hominin locomotion across complex terrains led by Principal Investigator Dr Ashleigh Wiseman
www.cam.ac.uk
November 20, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
theguardian.com
A-level English, voluntary work, delayed citizenship: it’s Labour’s Orwellian Two Minutes Hate for immigrants | Nesrine Malik
A-level English, voluntary work, delayed citizenship: it’s Labour’s Orwellian Two Minutes Hate for immigrants | Nesrine Malik
It’s easier for politicians to blame others than to face the truth: Britain has been stripped of the spaces and opportunities that allow for true social integration, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik
www.theguardian.com
October 20, 2025 at 7:07 AM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
fabioalfieri2.bsky.social
Happy to share my first postdoc work published in @funecology.bsky.social ! A huge thank-you to @oliverdemuth.bsky.social @lizzysteell.bsky.social @fieldpalaeo.bsky.social @grumpydrfabre.bsky.social and to @snsf.ch

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Constrained variation in the internal architecture of avian wing bones
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
October 14, 2025 at 12:47 PM
oliverdemuth.bsky.social
Last week our in press manuscript was made available at @jexpbiol.bsky.social with the typeset version following soon. We conducted ex vivo XROMM experiments to determine the joint mobility in Red legged partridges and compared them with in silico simulations: doi.org/10.1242/jeb....
Accepted manuscript. Oliver E. Demuth, John R. Hutchinson, Vittorio La Barbera, Sharon E. Warner, Daniel J. Field; Soft tissue constraints on joint mobility in the avian shoulder. J Exp Biol 2025; jeb.250952. doi: https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.250952
September 30, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
cam-archaeology.bsky.social
We are delighted to share that Dr Ashleigh Wiseman has been awarded an @erc.europa.eu Starter Grant for her project STEPS: Biomechanical simulations of hominin locomotion across complex terrains.

👉 www.arch.cam.ac.uk/news/ashleig...

#ERCStG
Dr Ashleigh Wiseman awarded ERC starting grant
www.arch.cam.ac.uk
September 4, 2025 at 11:56 AM
oliverdemuth.bsky.social
Very proud of the amazing Dr. Ashleigh Wiseman! Securing an @erc.europa.eu starting grant is a huge achievement! Keep your eyes open for PostDoc opportunities in her new research group at @cam-archaeology.bsky.social @cam.ac.uk!!
September 4, 2025 at 10:44 AM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
armanafzadeh.bsky.social
I'm recruiting a PhD student to join the lab at @gtsciences.bsky.social in Fall 2026! Broad taxonomic and topical freedom under the umbrella of vertebrate joint form and function. Information here: www.manafzadeh.com – please share 🦴🩻
armanafzadeh.bsky.social Armita R. Manafzadeh @armanafzadeh.bsky.social · Jul 2
✨Some news✨: after finishing my postdoc, I’ll be starting my lab as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech. Join us in Atlanta to study how joints work and where they come from!
September 2, 2025 at 4:07 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
richardbomphrey.bsky.social
🚨 Hiring! We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher with expertise in computational fluid dynamics and structural simulations to investigate biomechanics and mechanosensory feedback in insect flight.

Extreme agility ✔️
Morphological computing ✔️
Meshes! ✔️

jobs.rvc.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...
a close up of a fly 's head with a blurred background .
ALT: a close up of a fly 's head with a blurred background .
media.tenor.com
September 2, 2025 at 4:22 PM
oliverdemuth.bsky.social
Interesting study, however, every scientist should stay as far away as possible from #generativeAI! It is literally just making things up with little to no control over the output. No morphology, soft tissues nor anything else can be "reconstructed" or "augmented" with genAI.
August 12, 2025 at 12:13 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
sketchy-raptor.bsky.social
Sauropods dared to ask the radical question: "What if dinosaurs were really, really big?"

I will post an ID chart later, but if anyone wants to guess, then feel free to sound off in the comments.

🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕🦕
July 11, 2025 at 9:45 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
robgmacfarlane.bsky.social
In the 1960s Switzerland had some of Europe's filthiest waterbodies.
Now its cities boast near-pristine rivers & lakes: "We are united by a love of water".
Lessons to learn here, about building emotional connection to water as well as infrastructure investment.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
From sewage and scum to swimming in ‘blue gold’: how Switzerland transformed its rivers
In the 1960s, the Swiss had some of the dirtiest water in Europe. Now, their cities boast pristine rivers and lakes – and other countries are looking to follow their lead
www.theguardian.com
March 29, 2025 at 4:33 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
sketchy-raptor.bsky.social
I finally got this working. Pro & uropatagium to follow.

Side note, while I'm aware of hypotheses about actinofibril function, I'm not a fan of the trope of pterosaur wing membranes shrinking to almost nothing when grounded rather than just being allowed to fold, even a little bit.
March 27, 2025 at 10:05 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
sketchy-raptor.bsky.social
EEVEE tests 🦖
March 2, 2025 at 10:06 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
fieldpalaeo.bsky.social
'Dino Birds' airs on @pbs.org in N. America tomorrow (9pm, 5th Feb.). Follow research from our lab and colleagues around the world revealing the origin of birds. Hope you enjoy it!

www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vi...

@stevebrusatte.bsky.social @gnavalon.bsky.social @ksepkalab.bsky.social
Dino Birds
Fossils reveal how birds survived the killer asteroid and became today’s only living dinosaurs.
pbs.org
February 4, 2025 at 9:52 AM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
tweetisaurus.bsky.social
Amazing successful day here in Morocco setting up a prep lab with our collaborators at USMBA. We even managed to start prepping some new Spicomellus material! Big, big thanks to @afossilpreparator.bsky.social and Kate @Zoic Palaeotech! Impossible without their hard work! @richardjbutler.bsky.social
February 3, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
sketchy-raptor.bsky.social
Whaddaya think of this bones I got
February 3, 2025 at 12:13 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
markwitton.bsky.social
For #FossilFriday, here's some #paleoart of a casual afternoon in the Early Cretaceous Wealden group, with iguanodonts, tyrannosauroids, polacanthids and sauropods making a mess of a watering hole. The mashed-up muds left by these animals can be found to this day in Wealden rocks. #dinosaurs #sciart
A blue-skied landscape set around a watering hole in the Early Cretaceous. Three large, subtly-striped iguanodonts are emerging from the water while white flying reptiles flap past them. They approach a group of smaller iguanodont species with red-orange backs and pink-grey hides, who are drinking from the water. Seen between them is the front half of an armoured dinosaur, a polacanthid, walking by. The group of small iguanodonts stands on a churned-up mess of brown mud, the product of many heavy animals coming to drink. In the mid-foreground is a small, gold tyrannosauroid with its head tilted back to trickle water down its throat. Several small, bird-like oviraptorosaurs sneak along the water margin in the lower left. Dinosaurs of opposing size - two enormous, long-armed brachiosaurs - stand in the far distance, in front of a sparse forest.
January 31, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
tinylongwing.bsky.social
An older piece - an immature male American Redstart preening, showcasing how these young males spend about a year looking like females, except for patchy black speckling that comes in at about a year of age. 🎨🪶 #SciArt #BirdArt
Illustration of an immature male American Redstart perched on a branch in front of a mottled green background. He has his tail fanned, and his head turned to preen the feathers above his right hip. He has a greenish back, white flanks, and that big fanned tail is dusky gray-brown with broad yellow patches on either side. His head is a soft gray, mottled by little flecks of adult-like black feathers.
January 25, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
himmapaan.bsky.social
Diplodocus. Ink on Arches hot pressed, 263 × 105 mm.

One of my ten infostation illustrations for the new exhibition which opened last week at the Natural History Museum UZH

Read more about the mounting adventures of 'HQ1' the Diplodocus in @dennish.bsky.social's #NMZChronicles!
Silhouette illustration in black ink of a Diplodocus, a long-necked dinosaur, walking towards the right of the image, its head turned back to look behind it. Pterosaurs and early birds flutter over and around it, whilst a small theropod looks on.
March 25, 2024 at 10:43 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
richardjbutler.bsky.social
The calls for #2025SVP symposia, field trip and workshop proposals are now live. Please consider proposing and get in contact if there's anything the local host committee can do to support!

vertpaleo.org/call-for-202...

vertpaleo.org/call-for-202...
January 23, 2025 at 8:56 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
crocholliday.bsky.social
Got to see the latest Squirrel-raptor at The Field Museum. Its exquisite preparation was done by Connie Van Beek and Akiko Shinya. Here’s Connie working on a more recent bird from the Green River Fm., a similar type of slab fossil, just ~90degrees of Eocene longitude away and ~90million yrs later.
Archaeopteryx
January 23, 2025 at 5:37 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
fieldpalaeo.bsky.social
There have been lots of amazing advances in palaeornithology over the last few years. In this invited review we discuss recent discoveries bearing on the origin of the bird brain, shoulder, palate, and air-filled skeleton. Check it out open access here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
January 22, 2025 at 2:19 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
jackdashby.bsky.social
I love seeing skeletons actually doing something. Most often skeletons in #museums are just shown standing straight on four legs, but here we have pigeons in flight, jerboas jumping, a flying squirrel and sloth climbing, and a cheetah sprinting, at Paris' National Museum of Natural History.
pigeon skeletons in flight jerboa skeletons jumping a flying squirrel and sloth skeleton climbing A cheetah skeleton sprinting
January 22, 2025 at 10:59 AM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
arctomet.bsky.social
Daniel J. Field, M. Grace Burton, Juan Benito, Olivia Plateau and Guillermo Navalón (2025)
Whence the birds: 200 years of dinosaurs, avian antecedents
Biology Letters 21(1): 20240500
doi: doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
Whence the birds: 200 years of dinosaurs, avian antecedents | Biology Letters
Among the most revolutionary insights emerging from 200 years of research on dinosaurs is that the clade Dinosauria is represented by approximately 11 000 living species of birds. Although the origin of birds among dinosaurs has been reviewed extensively, ...
doi.org
January 22, 2025 at 1:52 PM
Reposted by Dr. Oliver Demuth
franzanth.bsky.social
This is officially my horizontally longest image to date, depicting some of the earliest complex animals on the planet from 565 to 505 million years ago and how they changed over time.

Thank you to @egmitchell.bsky.social and Steve Pates for trusting me with this gargantuan task! #Art #SciArt
the same image, repeated twice. one image is just a scenery, the other includes text and very complex arrows pointing to each other explaining the relationship between substrate, plankton, predators and other elements in a marine ecosystem. the scenery is of a seafloor split into 4 horizontal slices depicting 4 time frames. the first one is an ediacaran scene filled with frond-like organisms attached to the seafloor. the second one shows fewer fronds and more things crawling on the seafloor. the third shows a sponge reef, with herbivores and active predators lurking in the sediment. the fourth shows a very active cambrian period scene with swimmers and burrowers.
January 22, 2025 at 6:49 PM