Donald Davesne

The fossil is named in the honour of Manu Dibango, a musician and singer from Cameroon, whose influence has resonated worldwide.
I have had the privilege of knowing Manu since my childhood, and felt a hommage would be fitting after he passed from covid in 2020.

This is how it has been drawn by the artist Margaux Boetsch!
It is based on modern larvae, like those of cusk-eels (below), that look similar with their external gut and bizarre, colourful ornaments!
Although the "boomerang shape" of Dibango is not heard of in any other fish, fossil of modern.

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The extraordinary anatomy of this animal is so puzzling that it is currently not possible to assign it confidently to a spiny-rayed teleost clade. What we can suppose, however, is that its tiny abdominal cavity and long ventral projection of the pelvic girdle possibly supported an external gut

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Meet Dibango volans, a very weird fossil teleost 🐟 from the Eocene of Bolca, Italy!

Full article now available open access in @thepalass.bsky.social Papers in Palaeontology
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

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Published in @cybiumsfi.bsky.social (2024)vol.48(4)
"An unexplored anatomic region for phylogenetics : Architecture of the epicranial portion of the dorsal fin of the Bothidae (Teleostei: Pleuronectiformes)"
Chanet, B. @isyeb.mnhn.fr
#Anatomy #Dorsal_fin #Phylogeny
🐟 doi.org/10.26028/CYB...

Figure 2. Species tree for 45 pomacanthid species generated by IQ-TREE v.2.2.2 from concatenated UCE alignments (95% taxon completeness, corrected contigs). Node numbers represent ultrafast bootstrap support values UFBoot < 95, gene (gCF)  50 and 75% and site (sCF)  50 concordance factors. Node letters represent nodes highlighted in Table 2. Photographs by François Libert, Jake Adams, Gregory McFall and Klaus Stifel (CC BY-NY 2.0

Phylogenomics of marine angelfishes: diagnosing sources of systematic discordance for an iconic
reef fish family (F: Pomacanthidae).

Baraf et al. 2025 preprint in Systematic Biology

An ultraconserved elements phylogeny of the marine angelfishes with a deep dive into discordance in the tree.

PhD position alert: join a diverse team of palaeontologists to study the evolution of temnospondyls! The PhD project @smnstuttgart.bsky.social will focus on bone microanatomy: lots of fun with thin-sections and CT in perspective. Whoever you are: don't hesitate to reach out!
tinyurl.com/msvntnd9

"Grammatical gender: non-binary" 💛🤍💜🖤

Research biologist based in Berlin receives $10,000 prize given to unpublished Black poets A biologist’s debut poetry collection that weaves science with a condemnation of slavery and colonialism has received a $10,000 literary award.

Really looking forward to this book of poems - he presented an amazing poem at NAPC 2024.

Dr. Brandon Kilbourne’s “debut poetry collection [Natural History] that weaves science with a condemnation of slavery and colonialism has received a $10,000 literary award”

apnews.com/article/cave...

Very cool paper and approach! A highly recommended read!

Pac-Man looking Bathophilus brevis

Came across this glorious Pac-Man impersonator, Bathophilus brevis, while measuring fishes at the Scripps collection with @lizmillermacroevo.bsky.social. It just decided that all it needed in life was a huge mouth and a tail 😂

Lungfishes Alice Clement introduces the lungfishes, a group of sarcopterygian fishes that uses lungs to breathe and is the living sister group to tetrapod vertebrates.

What would you most like to know about #lungfishes? ... Why they have such ginormous genomes? How they breathe air? How they embarrassed taxonomists?

Check out my Quick Guide, published in Current Biology today: www.cell.com/current-biol...

Blennies are some of my faves.
They are the perfect mix of goofy, kinda ugly and cute.

(Parablennius pilicornis - Lanzarote, Canary Islands)

Les bébés poissons lunes sont acérés mais mignons http://ssaft.com/Blog/dotclear/?post/2012/09/12/Oceanario

A glossy, jet-black fish placed on a white measuring board with centimetre and millimetre markings - the fish is approximately 10cm in length. The tail fin is deeply forked, and just forwards of this there are two large white light organs that are highly reflective on the top and bottom of the caudal peduncle, the fleshy part of the tail. The dorsal fin is large and placed just forwards of the midpoint of the fish. The fish is fusiform in shape. It has a large eye which reflects back a dim, glassy green, the only pop of colour on the whole animal. The scales are an obsidian black. Credit: Own photo.

It would be impossible to cover bioluminescence for #25DaysOfFishmas and not discuss lanternfish. They are, by biomass, the most important group of mesopelagic fish, and are highly diverse, so I've just picked my personal favourite - Lampadena speculigera, the mirror lanternfish.

📺Podcast vidéo du séminaire @isyeb.bsky.social avec Isabelle Collet, Professeure à l'Université de Genève. Présentation intitulée Femmes et numérique.
A voir sur YouTube #ISYEB @mnhn.fr @sorbonne-universite.fr @cnrs.bsky.social #EPHE-PSL - #Université_des_Antilles
➡️ isyeb.mnhn.fr/fr/agenda/is...

Merci !!!

For my first post here, I am very pleased to announce that this week I start a permanent position as assistant professor at Sorbonne Université, Paris!