Nico Mongiardino Koch

Weirdly enough, that skull seems to be from Aenigmatorhynchus and corresponds to a paper published last June (doi.org/10.1098/rsos...). The journal seems to collect potential cover images from authors and then use them for an unrelated volume published later on

Phylogenomics of extant Crinoidea (Echinodermata) reveals extensive morphological homoplasies and a Permian origin Abstract. Crinoids have Ordovician origins and are unique among living echinoderms in their attachment to the substrate. Most diversity is within Comatulid

When I started my PhD ~10 years ago, only 2/5 echinoderm groups (the star-shaped sea stars and brittle stars) had genome-scale phylogenetic datasets. I am proud to say that the quest to complete the clade is now over

doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

Becoming a part of the @systbiol.bsky.social community is one of my greatest scientific achievements. I am happy to celebrate this today with a journal cover and a nomination to the editorial team

Spring is here

Evolutionary rate incongruences in squamates reveal contrasting patterns of evolutionary novelties and innovation Abstract. Understanding the rate of phenotypic evolution can reveal fundamental aspects of organismal evolutionary trajectories. Hence, several studies hav

Our latest paper, now how to conciliate apparently discrepant evolutionary rate patterns in squamates, but which may well apply to any study system with Stephanie Pierce and
@7brumas.bsky.social
#macroevolution

academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

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...

Seeing these after laying down the first volume of Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques, devoted to the rearing behavior of predatory wasps, was a treat. Thanks for sharing Marshall!

I use it all the time, along with mean()

Flyer for the next instalment of the Palaeoverse Lecture Series. The flyer features a yellow cartoon trilobite, and pictures of Drs. Mongiardino Koch and Garwood. Mongiardino Koch wears a grey t-shirt and glasses, while Garwood wears a white shirt and is holding a glass trophy.

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨
🗓️25th September 2025, 15:00 UTC🗓️

Join us next week to hear from @nmkphylo.bsky.social and @russellgarwood.co.uk, on “The Tree of Life and Death: What do Fossil Taxa Contribute to Morphological Phylogenetics?” 🌳🐣⚰️

Register here: bit.ly/palaeoverse-...

Today I learned the (very) hard way that R will tell you a file does not exist even when it totally does if the path to it exceeds 260 characters

(in Windows)

(and you can enable long paths, but it is not the default)

I will forever despise whoever named some closely related echinoid genera with a name starting with “Paleo” and others with a name starting with “Palaeo”

A Sunday reading Fabre’s “Souvenirs entomologiques” by the fireplace is a Sunday well spent

Actually, I got it wrong, it is -3. I was going with alternating between subtracting -2 - (i - 1)/2 and adding 1, where i is the iteration

Following the sequence would make state 5 = -4 median eyes

A student once asked me why wasn’t I using which.min(x) instead of which(x == min(x)) and I pretended it was for pedagogical purposes

Congratulations James! That’s outstanding

And this breakthrough required only.. how many months in Berlin??

A flyer for the Palaeoverse Lecture Series for Summer 2025 June 26th - Dr Katie Collins, Natural History Museum “Both round and upward: Spiral morphometry and how to compare things that are the same, but different” July 31st - Summer break August 28th - Amy Shipley, University of Leeds “Modelling ancient food webs: ecosystem changes across the Pliocene marine megafaunal extinction” September 25th - Dr Nicolás Mongiardino Koch, UC San Diego and Dr Russell Garwood, University of Manchester “The Tree of Life and Death: What do fossil taxa contribute to morphological phylogenetics?”

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨

It’s time to announce our Summer 2025 talk schedule 👀
Looking forward to hearing from @spissatella.bsky.social, @sauropodlets.bsky.social, @nmkphylo.bsky.social and @russellgarwood.co.uk!

Sign up here: bit.ly/palaeoverse-lecture-series-2025

Yeah, it is true that the result deviates from the expectations of ordering variables/observations. If the matrix format that sapply outputs isn’t convenient you can use lapply instead, or you can just transpose it

I think this is because you are not supposed to use sapply on matrices. If you do it probably gets coerced into a data.frame, whose elements are the columns.

Anyways, not long ago I discovered asplit() which is pretty handy when needing the flexibility to work across either margin

Sleep Token is horny metal?? 😆 @brenenwynd.bsky.social what are your thoughts on this?

Redefining music 25 years after your debut album is something that was probably done only once

📢 Tired of choosing between fossils to incorporate into your phylogenetic analysis? Us too.
💥 Check out our new preprint on incorporating stratigraphic ranges into the FBD model, implemented in BEAST2. We explore how using ranges affects the inference of dog 🐶 and penguin 🐧 trees 🌳

She’s never worn fake eyelashes in her whole life

I'm recruiting a PhD student to join my lab at the University of New Orleans starting in Fall 2025. Research topics will focus on building and using phylogenies to study the diversification of birds, with an emphasis on Neotropical bird radiations. Contact me if interested.

Great news!! Congrats 🥳

A Jurassic acanthocephalan illuminates the origin of thorny-headed worms - Nature An acanthocephalan body fossil, Juracanthocephalus daohugouensis, is described from the Middle Jurassic Daohugou biota of China, showing previously unrecognized diversity in ancient Acanthocephal...

I finally have something worth posting here! A new paper on wormsI never expected to see fossilised! Juracanthocephalus is the first body fossil of Acanthocephala and remarkably provides links with rotifers and other gnathiferans.

Published in @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Malvinas War erupted 43 years ago. Its memory remains to this day alive in every corner

Ahh the smell of fresh reviews in the morning