A new #PhD opportunity supervised by @drmambobob.bsky.social and me at the @uniofreading.bsky.social on dragonfly and damselfly evolution!

It is competition funded through the CROCUS partnership, and involves a mix of palaeontology and comparative biology.

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

🚨New Pub!🚨A re-evaluation of the notosuchian crocodyliform Eremosuchus elkoholicus from the lower Eocene of Algeria and the evolutionary and biogeographic history of sebecids🐊🇩🇿By Nicholl et al.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

We are phasing out the terms “extant” and “extinct” from our exhibits and will now refer to species as either “Darwinners" or “Darlosers.”

It was a pleasure to show some of my later PhD's work on developing new phylogenetic comparative methods to detect the effect of inter-specific competition on long-term trait evolution at #2025SVP 🦕 The models I showed should be available soon in the RPANDA Package, stay tunned !

Looking for a PhD opportunity? I'm hoping to recruit someone to my group at Durham University to work on a project combining fieldwork and labwork to study speciation in rubyspot damselflies: iapetus.ac.uk/studentships...

Get in touch if you want to chat!

When people celebrate the individual genius of folks in science, they should also
mourn the collective loss of genius of folks who were actively discouraged or disadvantaged from a career in science because of the same person(s)

People on twitter are losing their minds over this, including several scientists who I have to assume have either brain poisoned themselves or were always like this. People don't always cite what's best; they cite what they know & researchers from historically excluded communities get the short end.

Super excited to see the #SVP2025 #2025SVP abstract book out! Remember that all abstracts are under embargo ahead of the meeting.

New paper today in @science.org: we date the Naashoibito Member (New Mexico) to 66.4–66.0 Ma, coeval with the Hell Creek, with important remarks on pre-extinction dinosaur diversity & regionalisation in North America 🦖🦕☄1/
Art: @nataliajagielska.bsky.social
🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Excited to share our new paper where we find that the rise, decline and fall of clades is not explained by the usual suspects (diversity-dependence, ecological opportunities) but rather by species' insidious loss of macroevolutionary fitness: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/3

Demosponges were one of the first multicellular animals. Chemical fossils of distinctive steroids made by demosponges show that the group dates back to the Neoproterozoic era, significantly predating the Cambrian explosion. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/qNB750XaAmV

🚨 Last call!
Bayesian phylogenetic inference with BEAST2

📅 October 27 th – November 7th, 2025
💻 Online

#TScourses #KeepLearning

First post here to show a bit the work I did with Joëlle Barido-Sottani and Hélène Morlon on phylogenetic diversification models with heterogeneous rates in a Fossilized BD Framework
🦴:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
The paper is still under review but the method is already available in BEAST 2 !

🌳 What can Bayesian inference tell us about evolutionary history?
New edition of the course: Bayesian phylogenetic inference with BEAST2.

📅 27th October – 7th November 2025 (Online)

#WeareTransmittingScience

Classic macroecological laws-long held as signatures of biological systems-also emerge in economic and geological systems. The real signal lies not in the static universal patterns, but in how those patterns shift with scale 🌐🧪 #scaling #macroecology journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

New Element in the Philosophy of Biology series—free to download until October 6! Walter Veit examines the role of models in evolutionary biology: their types, testability, and interrelations 👇📕 www.cambridge.org/core/element... #philsci #HPBio #evobio

I am extremely happy to see that our review on fossil tip-dating is out in early view in Systematic Biology! A huge thanks to all the authors of this massive project (@heckeberg.bsky.social, @basantakhakurel.bsky.social, Gustavo Darlim, and @hoehna.bsky.social)! academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

👏🍾Congratulations to Joëlle Barido-Sottani, winner of the ERC Starting Grant 2025 for her project MORPHOFBD on Using morphological information to accurately date phylogenies and understand past diversification dynamics.
🔗 www.bio.ens.psl.eu/depbio/spip....
#ERCStG