Alexis Licht

Metazooa Become an evolutionary detective to find the Mystery Animal!

Great game for taxonomists!
metazooa.com

Check out the video of @mustafayk.bsky.social speaking about his work on past climate and dispersals !

Assistant Professor in Earth materials & mineral science Are you the team player and initiative taking entrepreneur to complement our Earth Sciences faculty in earth materials research and/or mineral sciences?

Come join us at Utrecht Eartn Sciences!

www.uu.nl/en/organisat...

If you're an #EcoEvo #PhD candidate anywhere in the world looking for project funding, consider applying for the @asn-amnat.bsky.social Student Research Award.

Ten proposals for $2k in research funds will be awarded. Due 13 March 2026.

Please share widely! 🧪 #grants #ecology #evolution #behavior

Dozens of researchers will move to France from US following high-profile bid to lure talent Large proportion worked at Columbia University, which had its grants cut and frozen by the administration of US President Donald Trump.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Pauline Coster and @alexislicht.bsky.social presenting their results on the Eocene paleontological record of Kazakhstan today at the Satpaev Institute of geology in Almaty.

I'm becoming a fake expert in the taxonomy of fossil beavers. So many of them here

Visiting the Satpaev Institute of geology in Almaty for a week, to work with our @dispersal-erc.bsky.social collaborators. And enjoying a tea with one of the last living vertebrate paleontologists in Kazakhstan, Bolat Baishashov!

Big shout-out to Leny Montheil!
His first ERC Dispersal interview is now live and comes with a brand-new paper on how Asian mammals crossed shifting continents during the Eocene (-80 to -40 Ma) doi.org/10.1016/j.ea...

Watch continents move 🌍

The first PhD paper of @benjaminraynaud.bsky.social, also featuring @carinahoorn.bsky.social, @mustafayk.bsky.social, and many others! A dive into the Eocene flora of Balkanatolia.

A new video of the @dispersal-erc.bsky.social featuring the work of Leny Montheil, who has been working with us for 18 months !

Yep !

I don't know yet what the data will tell us about the dynamics of pedogenic carbonate growth. We've started a bunch of geochemical analyses on them, and on the water samples, which should tell us when they seasonally grow. Nothing on truffles, but I'm sure Pierre wouldn't have minded.

Many things have changed since we started the experiment. Pierre died in 2022, it was tough for the whole village. The trees kept growing and the nursery was abandoned for quite some time. Lately, a beekeeper installed his hives just next to my station, making sampling a little bit more challenging

I quickly left the truffles behind, because i realised that the ground was full of fresh pedogenic carbonates, so the nursery became my natural laboratory to study the growth of their growth.

The experiment started as a semi-joke with Pierre Nitard, my father's neighbour in Collias. "Could you predict when I get truffles in my oak nursery with climate data?" So I dug up some holes, set up some temperature and humidity sensor in the ground and in the air, and a rainwater collector.

Today, I celebrate the end of an experiment. It has been five years, during COVID times, that I set up this climate station in Collias, in southern France. Every first day of the month, I came here to get my rainwater sample. And today was the final sampling day. (1/n)

Twitter post screenshot of the San Miguel Sheriff account. 5 years ago they posted about a boulder on the road but referred to it as "Large boulder the size of a small boulder".

Happy 6th "Large boulder the size of a small boulder" anniversary to those who celebrate! #Geology ⚒️

The first clumped isotope results from our platform at @cerege.bsky.social. Two long years of hardwork in the lab.

A new preprint from our research group is online!
In this paper, Paul Botté, PhD student in the project at @climatecerege.bsky.social, studied the evolution of continental environmental through the late Eocene and earliest Oligocene in central Anatolia.

egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/20...

A short video on our work about Eocene primate dispersal, part of the project @dispersal-erc.bsky.social.
And a great opportunity to hear one of the best Frenglish accents around.

Un grand botaniste et un grand penseur de notre rapport à la nature.

So, did primates and rodents raft on vegetation debris to reach South America? This crazy hypothesis remains so far the only mechanism to reach South America during the Eocene. But why only at 40 Ma, and how? Questions that we will try to answer in the next few years -- more on this topic soon (n/n)

Leny showed that primates and rodents could have hopped along archipelagoes from Balkanatolia to North Africa. But there is no viable archipelago to reach South America from Africa via island hopping, even in the most extreme scenarii (3/n).

In this paper, Leny Montheil, postdoc at @climatecerege.bsky.social within the ERC project @dispersal-erc.bsky.social, reconstructed at high resolution the paleogeography of the Atlantic and Neotethyan domain 40 Million years ago, using the most recent plate reconstructions. (2/n)

🚨New paper alert🚨 40 million years ago, anthropoid primates and rodents dispersed from East Asia to Africa and South America, across two wide oceans (the Neotethys and the Southern Atlantic). So Which way did they pass? @dispersal-erc.bsky.social (1/n)
doi.org/10.1016/j.ea...

Don't eat that! A large foraminifera trying to eat grains of olivine. It soon realised that they weren't food, but had no problems afterwards, so... not poison!

#exoCeanadvent Day 9: Meet Maxime (again). At @exoceanlab.bsky.social and @climatecerege.bsky.social Maxime has been conducting several experiments focusing on the culture of marine organisms. One project involved culturing foraminifera in the presence of olivine (Mg,Fe)2SiO4, an igneous mineral.

🌍🔬 Calling all aspiring palaeontologists!
Here are 10 open PhD opportunities from across the palaeo world 🦖📚
Explore the projects, find deadlines, and start your research journey!

👉 More info on our official website:
palass.org/phd-opportun...
#PhD #PalAss #Opportunity

Clay suggests that this isolation was associated with a moderate uplift generated by an episode of lithospheric foundering, tens of millions of years before what is commonly proposed in the area. This scenario opens new interpretative ways for the rich geomorphological history of Anatolia! (n/n)