Lisa Whitenack, PhD

300 high school and college students from 5 marching bands standing at attention on a football field

It’s band-tober, which means that marching band is our entire life right now. Tonight was a small show (4 HS bands and 1 college band), but the closer had them all playing Sweet Caroline together.

Music brings such joy in a timeline where it is tough to find.

Large 3D printed model of a dogfish skull with jaws and arches

Several students in a classroom working with large 3D printed shark skull models

My comparative anatomy students had a blast learning with these @3danatomystudios.com shark skull models this week!

Check out this rare faculty-curator position at OU:

Today marks the first day in public media’s history without federal funding. And we’re not going anywhere.

Listeners like you keep our mission alive. Protect one of the last places where America comes together to hear itself.

Stand with us today. Donate at this link: n.pr/46wamAj

Webpage on the hidden curriculum of applying to ecology and evolution grad programs in the US (a lot of the info applies to other fields too, but perhaps less well): applyingtoeeb.info

#AcademicSky 🧪

New paper alert!!!🚨 in our new study we find that Antarctic icefishes added a new module in their skulls during their adaptive radiation special shout out to @mayaranevesbio.bsky.social who led this project!

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Postcard depicting a woman standing next to a Dunkleosteus skull, with a banner that says “Dunkleosteous hinged jaws of death” at the top of the postcard and a circle that says “mysterious underwater creatures” in the lower right corner

I do still have it!!

Disability in ecology and evolution In this TrendsTalk series, ‘Disability in ecology and evolution,’ in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, we will be hearing from people about their experiences being disabled in ecology and evolution. We...

Happy to share that @taorminalepore.bsky.social and I are featured in @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social's continuing series sharing disabled scientists in ecology and evolution spaces! www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

One more cephalopod video for your enjoyment: clumsy Nautilus

<donk>

Doomscroll safety stop! 🛑

Watch this wickedly awesome video of a sperm whale eating a giant squid!

AND if you read the thread, you’ll see it’s been fact checked.

🤯

Ok, carry on

Do it. It's the only way I can make sure I have any time to write/read for researchy things and I recommend this to all of my new faculty. I forgot to block out one of my times this week, and I have all of the meetings now.

I need more papers like this in my life

OMG, amazing.

Although, if they're having poultry for dinner, they're not wrong about it being dinosaur meat.

It wasn’t labeled, but @billryerson.bsky.social said it’s either that or an emerald tree boa. I know very few snake species…

(Yes it’s half a snake. That’s how it came)

The front half of a frozen boid snake

Wow, it’s been a while since an afternoon of lab work has made me this stinky.

But I did manage to finally prep out a freeze dried snake and a barracuda head . Both have been sitting in my work freezer for 8 years, and before then were in Tom Frazetta’s freezer probably for decades.

Oh man, I might still have a postcard of one of these banners with Dunkleosteus on it. I think it’s on my office door!

If you're using our textbook for a course you're teaching, can you please fill out this quick Google Form so that we know how many folks have adopted it?

forms.gle/47wJtmEMYMM8...

JOBS JOBS JOBS! Stony Brook are advertising two assistant professorships in vertebrate palaeo/evolution, one focused on (in the words of the SVP programme) NOT DINOSAURS and the other on evolutionary neurology:
apply.interfolio.com/172502
apply.interfolio.com/172517

Can’t wait to bring this to my comparative anatomy class on Friday! I keep telling them that new stuff is discovered about vertebrate bodies constantly - and here’s more proof of that.

Undergraduate and graduate students can get $1500 ($2000 for international students) to visit and study in our museum collections. Contact a curator to discuss plans first to make sure we have what you need (that would be @planet-of-fishes.bsky.social for the Ichthyology Department). Come to LA!

It’s nice to do something fun for a good cause among all of this <gestures at world>

Guest bartending at my local bar to raise $ for a local foundation that benefits our school district’s kids while also representing my kids’ marching band.

Our lights are 🎵 and our hats are music themed!

Our paper on MISS programming effectiveness was recently published in Integrative & Comparative Biology! 📄

Read all about our journey (so far!), our mission, methods, and outreach programs at the link below! ⤵️

academic.oup.com/icb/advance-...

UC Berkeley's Martin Fish Speciation Lab seeks a part-time lab manager for pupfish research. Requires a biology degree and some lab experience. Flexible hours, multi-year position. Apply: chmartin@berkeley.edu. More info at https://ib.berkeley.edu/labs/martin/ #job

If you know anyone interested in starting a Master's project working on ammonoid phylogenetics (or the phylogenetics of a mollusc group spanning the OAE2 event in the Late Cretaceous), then ask them to get in touch with me.

The situation is a little tricky, as it would be funded by the remainder…

Bite by bite: How jaws drove fish evolution If you're reading this sentence, you might have a fish to thank. Fish were the first animals to evolve jaws. They use their jaws primarily to eat, but also for defense, as tools—such as to burrow or t...

🐟 Bite by bite: @umich.edu researchers traced how jaws fueled the rise of vertebrates. In the Devonian, lobe-finned fishes (ancestors of today’s coelacanths & lungfish) drove jaw innovation—before stalling out. #Science
news.umich.edu/bite-by-bite...

Curator job opening at the fabulous American Museum of Natural History in New York City!

Know a marine fish person 🐠 or oceanographer who might be interested?

Text: Society for the Study of Evolution Graduate Research Excellence Grants. Rosemary Grant Advanced Awards, Deadline: September 15, 5:00 PM Eastern.

Proposals are due next week for the Rosemary Grant Advanced Awards! These grants provide up to $3500 US in funding for PhD students. Contact communications@evolutionsociety.org with any questions. www.evolutionsociety.org/content/soci...

My very first talk at a conference was with old school slides. It was super stressful to get those done! And I also think I still have overheads somewhere from teaching in grad school…

Me, this morning, in a weird meta moment:

updating slides and lecture notes for comparative anatomy,

thinking to myself "ugh, I feel weird aligning my lecture stuff so closely to a particular textbook"...

..and then remembering that I wrote the textbook chapter I'm working with.