John Rowan

The figure used in my News & Views commentary. I generated the CT-based rendering of the holotype skull of Nanotyrannus lancensis (CMNH 7541), based on a recent scan. The lower image was done by the Nature art department.

Here's the free link to the print version that I'm permitted to share: https://rdcu.be/eNv94. You can't download it but you can screen-capture its two pages if you really need a copy.

Our casts of (bottom) the holotype of Nanotyrannus lancensis (CMNH 7541), (middle) the newly named holotype of N. lethaeus (BMRP 2002.4.1), and (top) T. rex (AMNH 5027). We published on CMNH 7541 in 2010 (http://bit.ly/3X5nCGm).

Today's bombshell in @nature.com by Lindsay Zanno & James Napoli @jgn-paleo.bsky.social (bit.ly/4qBE6ng) shows that putative juvvy T. rex fossils actually are Nanotyrannus. I reviewed the manuscript, so Nature invited me to write the News & Views commentary. Free link: rdcu.be/eNv94 🦖

Thank you!! Lovely group of colleagues indeed 😁

Honored (and surprised!) to receive a Philip Leverhulme Prize, but grateful to @leverhulme.ac.uk and @cam-archaeology.bsky.social for their support.

Black background with gold swirls. 2025 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winners announced. Celebrating the achievements of thirty outstanding scholars. Leverhulme Trust logo and URL leverhulme.ac.uk/news/2025PLP.

The Trust is thrilled to announce the 2025 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winners. Congratulations to this year’s cohort. Thirty extraordinary researchers from across a range of disciplines: leverhulme.ac.uk/news/2025PLP

Today was the ceremony for new fellows at the #BritishAcademy - it was wonderful 🤩. I am thrilled and so grateful to the colleagues who nominated me, elected me, and the many colleagues, students, friends, our kids & family, & specially Rob 😍 who have so enriched my life and career ❤️

Simulating the formation of herbivore tooth death assemblages to improve expectations for paleoenvironmental reconstruction from intra-tooth isotopic analysis Isotopic analysis of serially-sampled dental enamel from fossil faunal assemblages is a popular paleoenvironmental proxy for its ability to inform on …

I'm really excited about this new paper, with @dayvees.bsky.social, where we use simulations to explore how herbivore tooth growth and development, demography, and dental wear mediate the seasonal signal preserved in serially sampled teeth!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.

Horrific reporting from the AP on the Myanmar families watching their kids starve to death from Trump and Musk’s aid cuts apnews.com/article/myan...

Bayesian analyses of radiocarbon dates suggest multiple origins of ceramic technology in Early Holocene Africa Nature Communications - Several possible points of origin have been proposed for the spread of ceramic technology in Saharan Africa between 11–10,000 years ago. Here, the authors...

⚠️Paper Alert!⚠️
Excited to share this paper with @roccoro.bsky.social where we examined whether ceramic technology in Saharan Africa was the result of a single or multiple episodes of innovation & diffusion
rdcu.be/eJi3g

Who's got unfused parietals and probably wasn't a stem snake? This guy.

My explainer about the Yunxian 2 study

Mark Norell, Who Studied Link Between Dinosaurs and Birds, Dies at 68

New York Times obituary for one of New York’s greatest characters. RIP Mark, and you’d enjoy the Romanian palinka we’re toasting in your honor tonight!

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/s...

And see this excellent coverage from our Department @cam-archaeology.bsky.social

www.arch.cam.ac.uk/news/early-h...

Giraffes are four distinct species, major report confirms The revised classification will help ensure different giraffe populations are adequately protected, conservationists say

Giraffes, long considered a single species, are in fact four. https://scim.ag/4n2po6f

Come work with me! (Or Gabrielle or James)

stonybrooku.taleo.net/careersectio...

📣 Work with us! 📣

The Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge is looking to appoint an Assistant Professor in Zooarchaeology.

📅 Closing date: 15 September
👉 More info and how to apply: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/assista...

Behavior drives morphological change during human evolution Dietary shifts and corresponding morphological changes can sometimes evolve in succession, not concurrently—an evolutionary process called behavioral drive. Detecting behavioral drive in the fossil re...

Really cool study looking at how behaviour precedes morphological change across taxa - and implications for human evolution 💀🧪 massive congrats to all the authors, including @vivek123.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Pleased to present our new preprint on sleep and circadian rhythms among the Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia.

This is a fascinating system for exploring sleep biology. Lots of variation in light exposure, housing type, and subsistence.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧵 below.

Seed dispersal disruption limits tropical forest regrowth | PNAS Identifying linkages between biodiversity loss and climate change is required for understanding the scope of these interconnected challenges and de...

Our new study shows how animal biodiversity loss is a climate problem: tropical forests recover far less carbon where seed dispersers have declined.

We’re not just losing forests – we’re losing their ability to regrow.

Reversing that trend could align biodiversity recovery with climate solutions.🧵

Announcement at the British Academy

Fabulous news that @martamlahr.bsky.social has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy 🍾🍾🍾

Justus has shared every adventure in Turkana with us since 2010 - wonderful friend and colleague

Some personal news…

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

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...

Check out our new paper, led by former postdoc and current colleague Daniel Green on 18 Ma proteins in fossil teeth! Tim Cleland, a proteomics wizard, did the measurements. What's the take home? We hope to use protein fingerprints to study mammal and hominin phylogenetics! bit.ly/OldProteome

Meet The Bird That Soars Higher Than Any Other. Hint: It Flies Higher Than Commercial Airplanes Most bird species don’t fly above a few thousand feet in the air. But there are a few outliers. Here are some of the species that push the boundaries of their aerial potential – with a focus on the on...

www.forbes.com/sites/scottt...

Statistical modelling in archaeology: some recent trends and future perspectives This paper reviews the application of statistical models in archaeology in the last decade, focusing in particular on multilevel models, statistical t…

I'm happy to share this review article, where I attempt to ponder about missed opportunities in archaeological statistical modelling.

An elephant standing beneath large trees with text overlay that reads: 'How did humans become the most adaptable species on Earth?' Photo credit: Ondrej Pelanek and Martin Pelanek

Around 70,000 years ago, our ancestors in Africa began exploiting different habitats.

Flexibility to survive in deserts to rainforests enabled their successful spread ‘Out of Africa’.

Find out more about the study co-led by Andrea Manica @eegcam.bsky.social 👇
bit.ly/4e6i9H7

🚨 I'm looking for #Postdoc opportunities starting this September! 🧑‍🔬🔍
I'm a highly motivated researcher with experience in R, network analysis, and multivariate statistics. My focus is on the evolution of ecosystems and biodiversity over deep time.

"Nouvelle galerie de paléontologie et de préhistoire en Éthiopie" Le Musée national d’Éthiopie a inauguré sa nouvelle galerie permanente intitulée « Million years of Life and Culture in Ethiopia » palevoprim.labo.univ-poitiers.fr/2025/05/15/2... @palevoprim.bsky.social @cnrsecologie.bsky.social

Two major ecological shifts shaped 60 million years of ungulate faunal evolution - Nature Communications Here, the authors analyze a fossil dataset spanning 60 million years to investigate ecological stability. Their network analysis identifies prolonged stability interrupted by two major functional tran...

🦏🦣🦌 LARGE paper alert!!! We tracked 60 million years of large herbivore evolution—over 3,000 fossil species—to uncover how ecosystems have changed and reorganized through time. What we found might help us understand the next big tipping point 🧵👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Table showing funding requests for various directorates in NSF for FY 2026

The area of NSF that includes programs in biological and cultural anthropology and archaeology is the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences. The White House 2026 budget request for this area is a reduction of 77.3% from 2024 levels.

nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...