Laura Mulvey

New paper by Amy Shipley and Lydia Woods DeepBio@Leeds PGRs Amy Shipley and Lydia have published a review on the sixth mass extinction, as part of a working group on Cenozoic extinctions led out of the Anthropocene Biodiversity Centre at …

PGRs Amy Shipley (@sauropodlets.bsky.social) & Lydia Woods recently published a review in @globalchangebio.bsky.social showing that while today’s extinction rates aren't yet at "Big Five" mass extinction levels, they’re likely the highest seen in the last 66myrs.

amdunhill.co.uk/2025/11/17/n...

Applications for the London TREES DTP programme are now open: www.trees-dla.ac.uk/news/applica...

We have a project on Bayesian phylogenetics! 😀
www.trees-dla.ac.uk/projects/int...

Out now in Biology Letters, my latest paper tackles an apparently simple question: how many characters are needed to reconstruct a phylogeny? TL;DR: in most cases between 100 and 500, more than a substantial portion of morphological datasets, but the story is more complex... doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

The relationship between microbial community succession, decay, and anatomical character loss in non‐biomineralized animals A fundamental assumption of hypothesis-driven decay experiments is that, during decay, the loss of anatomy follows a sequence broadly controlled by the intrinsic compositional properties of tissues. ...

Bacteria 🦠 🧫 play a crucial role in how animals become fossils!
Read about how decay experiments demonstrate that bacteria from the gut dominate the thanatomicrobiome (the internal microbiome of decay) and probably control fossilisation in our new paper!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Really happy to see chapter 2 of my PhD published today in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social. DeepDiveR is an R package to assist with deep learning inference of biodiversity change through time 🤿🦊 Thanks to @bethanyjallen.bsky.social & Daniele Silvestro for the collaboration

doi.org/10.1111/2041...

A covarion model for phylogenetic estimation using discrete morphological datasets https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.20.660793v1

A woman delivering a talk

@lauramulvey.bsky.social absolutely killing it talking about the difference between model adequacy and model selection and describing lightweight methods to assess adequacy. #evol2025

Paper here academic.oup.com/sysbio/artic...

European Australian lifts leg onto window sill and holds aloft a Workshop invitation.

Sometimes in a fossil policy workshop you have to take a strong stand.

@thepalass.bsky.social

Interested in Developmental biology? Imaging? Marine invertebrate body plans? Then this three year postdoc in my group @sotonbiosciences.bsky.social is for you! Join our team to decypher how signalling molecules shape skeletal phenotype in juvenile sea urchins. jobs.soton.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

"...simulation studies demonstrate that empirical expertise is key to obtaining reliable results when using FBD models. It is therefore crucial that fundamental stratigraphic and taxonomic research remain well supported" 👏👏👏

Simplified flowchart illustrating generalised steps in palaeobiological research processes and the various factors that introduce inequity with regard to data collection, storage, study, analysis, publication, and reuse.

Delighted to share our paper on data equity in #palaeobiology as part of Paleobiology's 50th anniversary issue 🥳

We look at how palaeo data is collected, stored, curated & shared, and how equity in these processes is crucial for our field's future (1/n) 🧪⚒️

doi.org/10.1017/pab....

📢 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 🌳

🎂 Happy 10th birthday to the fossilised birth-death model, and happy 50th birthday to Paleobiology 🎂
I had a lot of fun working on this review, led by @lauramulvey.bsky.social, in which we celebrate how the FBD has been applied and give pointers to those interested in giving it a go! 🌳

Combining fossil taxa with and without morphological data improves dated phylogenetic analyses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.07.646048v1

YouTube video by The Palaeontological Association Palaeontologists Explain: How do fossils form? Palaeontologists explain: How do fossils form?

Very proud to be featured alongside other excellent early career scientists in a new video by @thepalass.bsky.social!

We talk about how fossils form and how rare they are!

youtu.be/LwF7qnYFde8?...

The clock is ticking 🕔! Pre-registration will close today March 14th (17:00h GMT+0), do not miss your chance to join us at the SystAssn-SRUK/CERU Bayesian Phylogenetics Workshop! 💻🧬

Like morphometrics, micro-CT scanning, and morphological evolution? Then please consider applying for our 18 month postdoc position at the university of Southampton! Details here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMF402/r...

And finally have it in preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In it, we (@basantakhakurel.bsky.social, @brenenwynd.bsky.social, @peterjwagner3.bsky.social, and Christian Kammerer) took a look at estimating a phylogenetic tree of dicynodonts using both discrete and continuous characters.

StratPal: An R package for creating stratigraphic paleobiology modelling pipelines The fossil record is an important source of information to understand biological processes that take place over timescales not accessible to human observation or experiments. Fossil data are not a...

🚨New Publication🚨
Seamlessly integrate #stratigraphy, #taphonomy, #ecology and evolutionary biology to build your modeling pipelines for stratigraphic #paleobiology
Published in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social , R package available on CRAN
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

As my very first post here on Bluesky I am happy to share our article in Royal Society about tooth wear and diet in the large Devonian chondrichthyan Ctenacanthus concinnus from Morocco

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Come be my colleague! Calling zoologists of all stripes! This is a pretty open search! If you research is cool and forward looking and if you care about good science questions and collections please apply!

A reminder that we have two open PhD projects on Bayesian phylogenetics in the lab:

One with the new TREE Doctoral Landscape Awards: www.trees-dla.ac.uk/projects/int... (deadline 20th Jan)

And another with CSC: www.findaphd.com/phds/project... (deadline 29th Jan)

🚨New #phylo paper alert!🚨 🌲+🔥= speciation? This one has been a bit of a journey, but thanks to lead author Dan Turck's expertise on #conifers it has turned out as quite the treasure-trove of conifer evolution! (reading-access link on my website)

Assessing the impact of character evolution models on phylogenetic and macroevolutionary inferences from fossil data https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.23.630137v1

A normal distribution drawn on graph paper decorated like a Christmas tree. Along the x-axis it says happy Xmas

Happy Christmas!

Check out the tutorial for posterior predictive simulations on the revbayes website
revbayes.github.io/tutorials/pp...

Huge thank you to all my co-authors for their help and guidance throughout this project @rachelwarnock.bsky.social, @wrightam.bsky.social, @hoehna.bsky.social, @jembrown.bsky.social, and Mike May 6/n

Further, we show how model selection approaches relying on calculating the marginal likelihoods, cannot be used to distinguish between models with different partitioning schemes. 5/n

We found that for many (but not all) empirical data sets, available models were in fact adequately describing the evolutionary process, and were therefore suitable for inference. 4/n

We adopted a model adequacy approach to assess the absolute fit of these models, and developed a workflow for posterior predictive simulations to evaluate how well available models of morphological evolution fit empirical data. 3/n