Gerard PJ

From molecular structures to research culture: Celebrating Rosalind Franklin’s legacy | Royal Society Rosalind Franklin never lived to see the full impact of her discoveries. She didn’t witness how her work on DNA would revolutionise biology, nor did she witness the impact she would have in…

Born #OnThisDay in 1920 was Rosalind Franklin. Her work on X-ray diffraction images of DNA helped lead to the discovery of its structure, but her efforts were only recognised posthumously. Liz Sockett FRS and Isabelle Moss reflect on her enduring legacy:

This is figure 1 from Eighteen million years of diverse enamel proteomes from the East African Rift. It shows Rift Valley fossils sampled over 29 million years.

Ancient proteins have been recovered from fossil relatives of rhinoceroses and other animals that are at least 18 million years old, according to evidence from two papers in Nature.

go.nature.com/4081H3m
go.nature.com/3Ik78Gj

#Paleosky 🧪

Eighteen million years of diverse enamel proteomes from the East African Rift - Nature The isolation of dental proteins from fossils deposited 1.5 million to 18 million years ago in the Turkana Basin in Kenya, a tropical region, demonstrate the promise of dental enamel for palaeoproteom...

Eighteen million years of diverse enamel proteomes from the East African Rift www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Global patterns of colouration complexity in the Paridae: Effects of climate and species characteristics across body regions | Journal of Animal Ecology | besjournals.onlineli... | #ornithology 🪶

Two photos of a preserved specimen of catfish on a black background, one in dorsal view (top) and the other in lateral view (bottom).

Two new suckermouth catfish species are described from the Eastern Zimbabwe Highlands freshwater ecoregion. Find out more about them here: doi.org/10.3897/zook...

#biodiversity #taxonomy #catfish

Ancient proteins rewrite the rhino family tree — are dinosaurs next? Molecules from 20-million-year-old teeth are among the oldest ever sequenced.

Molecules from 20-million-year-old rhino-relative teeth are among the oldest ever sequenced

go.nature.com/4lFx4KN

Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago Neanderthals intensively processed a minimum of 172 large mammals for grease and marrow fat, 125,000 years ago.

Neanderthals were rendering animal bones for grease in present-day Germany roughly 125,000 years ago—much earlier than thought, research in #ScienceAdvances suggests.

Charles Darwin's Manuscripts & Papers online darwin-online.org.uk/manuscripts....

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Fossilized gut contents elucidate the feeding habits of sauropod dinosaurs Poropat et al. report the first sauropod gut contents found worldwide in a specimen of Diamantinasaurus from the Cretaceous of Australia. These fully support previous hypotheses of sauropod herbivory ...

Fossilized gut contents elucidate the feeding habits of sauropod dinosaurs: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

In case anyone missed @archaeoalex.bsky.social's talk on using the ClassiCOL tool, it's now live on our YouTube channel! : youtu.be/CA36dn_zKfs?...

Archaeologist holding up a light in a partly-flooded cave chamber which contains most of the parietal motifs discovered. © A. Ruiz-Redondo, V. Barciela & X. Martorell.

The largest Palaeolithic cave art site in Eastern Iberia for #NationalCavesandKarstDay 🏺

The unusual techniques used to create the rock art make it unique in the region and it was some of our most-read research from 2023!

Learn more 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

PhD position in Virtual Anthropology Group - HEAS The Virtual Anthropology group at University of Vienna (Prof. Gerhard Weber) is now offering a position as a Ph.D. candidate (PraeDoc) in the area of 3D dental morphology. The position is funded by th...

#JobFairy #PhD #Anthropology

A PhD position in the Virtual Anthropology Group at @univie.ac.at with #HEASVienna member #GerhardWeber is now available.

More information and details on our website 👇🔗

A scenic photo of a wetland landscape with patches of colorful moss and vegetation surrounding calm pools of water that reflect the sky. In the background, a forested area leads to a range of snow-capped mountains under a bright blue sky dotted with white clouds.

Southern Chilean peatlands display unique ecological dynamics - this study sheds some light on the distribution and diversity of testate amoebae in these understudied systems: doi.org/10.3897/zook...

#biodiversity #Patagonia #ecology

Polyadic Grooming Patterns and Network in a Free‐Ranging Group of Japanese Macaques at Awajishima Grooming is the most common affiliative behavior in many primate species. While traditionally viewed as an exclusively dyadic interaction, polyadic grooming involving more than two individuals also o...

Polyadic Grooming Patterns and Network in a Free-Ranging Group of Japanese Macaques at Awajishima- American Journal of Primatology | Primates Journal | Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Functional and Morphological Differences in the Play Face and Full Play Face in Lowland Gorillas, a Hominid Species: Implications for the Evolutionary Roots of Smile and Laugh Face An example of image capturing with OpenFace 2.0. In the three images (N, PF, and FPF), 3D facial landmarks (red/blue dots), head pose traking (blue/violet 3D polygons) and eye gaze traking (light gre...

Functional and Morphological Differences in the Play Face and Full Play Face in Lowland Gorillas, a Hominid Species: Implications for the Evolutionary Roots of Smile and Laugh Face - Cordoni - 2025 - American Journal of Biological Anthropology onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Baboon travel progressions as a ‘social spandrel’ in collective animal behaviour Abstract. How individuals in a group move relative to one another can influence both their survival and fitness. Spatial positioning has been well studied

Baboon travel progressions as a ‘social spandrel’ in collective animal behaviour
academic.oup.com/beheco/advan...

Phylogenomics reveals the slow-burning fuse of diatom evolution | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Tail of defence: an almost complete tail skeleton of Plateosaurus (Sauropodomorpha, Late Triassic) reveals possible defence strategies | Royal Society Open Science In 2015, a partial skeleton of the Late Triassic dinosaur Plateosaurus trossingensis was excavated from Frick, Switzerland, and subsequently mounted at the Natural History Museum of Vienna in 2021. Th...

Tail of defence: an almost complete tail skeleton of Plateosaurus (Sauropodomorpha, Late Triassic) reveals possible defence strategies royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Enamel proteins reveal biological sex and genetic variability in southern African Paranthropus Paranthropus robustus is a morphologically well-documented Early Pleistocene hominin species from southern Africa with no genetic evidence reported so far. In this work, we describe the mass spectrome...

Enamel proteins reveal biological sex and genetic variability in southern African Paranthropus | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The next talk in our #PAASTACommunity seminar series will be next week Wednesday 06 June at 16:00 CET!

And while none of these talks are to be missed, Meaghan will be broaching a really important topic for working in palaeproteomics!

A name for the Provincial Fossil of British Columbia: a strange new elasmosaur taxon from the Santonian of Vancouver Island The first elasmosaurid skeleton from the Haslam Formation (Upper Santonian) of the Nanaimo Group (Late Cretaceous) on Vancouver Island was first described in 2002, and has recently been declared th...

Full article: A name for the Provincial Fossil of British Columbia: a strange new elasmosaur taxon from the Santonian of Vancouver Island www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Obsidian artifact from Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan. CREDIT: Mirsa Islas Orozco

A study of 788 obsidian artifacts from Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Mexica Empire, finds that ritual objects were made from the distinctive green and gold obsidian from Sierra de Pachuca, whereas workaday blades came from many sources. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Pleistocene island connectivity did not enhance dispersal or impact population size change in Galápagos #geckos #ProcB royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... #OpenAccess #Genomics #Evolution

Fossil skeleton set in a dark, fine grained matrix with vertebral column curled around. Regurgitalite consisting of a large, skeletally immature specimen referred to Stenopterygius sp. (SMNS 15194). White scale bar at the bottom is 10 cm.

Artist's reconstruction of the ichthyosaur Temnodontosaurus approaching the viewer with open mouth. Artwork by Davide Bonadonna.

New in #PapersinPalaeontology Fossilized gut contents of the largest predatory ichthyosaur from the Lower Jurassic of Germany: hunting, digestive taphonomy & prey preferences in a macropredator doi.org/10.1002/spp2... @smnstuttgart.bsky.social

This is figure 1, which shows the taxonomic identification of the 173 bone specimens analyzed using ZooMS, and examples of the main categories of elements.

Humans may have been making tools from whale bones up to 20,000 years ago, according to evidence presented in Nature Communications. go.nature.com/4kePeD6 🏺 🧪

More than a fingerprint on a pebble: A pigment-marked object from San Lázaro rock-shelter in the context of Neanderthal symbolic behavior - Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences The pebble discovered in the San Lázaro rock-shelter (Segovia, Central Spain) is the oldest known non-utilitarian object with a fingerprint made in Europe. Its morphology and the strategic position of...

More than a fingerprint on a pebble: A pigment-marked object from San Lázaro rock-shelter in the context of Neanderthal symbolic behavior
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Unveiling the Evolutionary History of cis‐Andean Alouatta (Atelidae, Alouattinae) Through Mitochondrial Genomes Mitochondrial DNA analysis suggests that founder-event speciation played a key role in the divergence between cis-Andean and trans-Andean clades, as well as in the diversification of cis-Andean linea...

Unveiling the Evolutionary History of cis-Andean Alouatta (Atelidae, Alouattinae) Through Mitochondrial Genomes
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Pacific hotspots reveal a Louisville–Ontong Java Nui tectonic link - Nature Geochemistry and geochronology show that Samoa and Rurutu–Arago are the longest-lived Pacific hotspots, providing better constraints on plate rotation and support for a link between the Louisville vol...

Pacific hotspots reveal a Louisville–Ontong Java Nui tectonic link
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ice nucleation by volcanic ash greatly alters cirrus cloud properties Volcanic ash plays an important role in modifying cirrus properties through the formation of ice crystals in the atmosphere.

Ice nucleation by volcanic ash greatly alters cirrus cloud properties | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...