Rafaela Missagia

Your regular reminder:

Please do not call bad-acting humans "rats." This is slander against rats.

BIRDBASE dataset tracks ecological traits for 11,589 species of birds Çağan Şekercioğlu was an ambitious, but perhaps naive graduate student when, 26 years ago, he embarked on a simple data-compilation project that would soon evolve into a massive career-defining achiev...

Introducing BIRDBASE, which aims to be the world's most comprehensive avian trait ecology database. Article links to open access paper, & data in Excel spreadsheet. phys.org/news/2025-09... #science #environment #ecology #eco #biology #bird #birds #birding #birdwatching #openaccess #datascience

Hahahahaha good to know! 😂

I relate 100%. Learning to play bass after finally getting a job in academia (but no one to play with in a new city). :(

you should be using pak

Ever run `install.packages()` and wish it were faster, smarter, and more reliable?

The {pak} package speeds things up with parallel downloads, dependency solving, and reproducible installs.

📦 pak.r-lib.org

#RStats

What is animal venom? Rethinking a manipulative weapon The scientific study of animal venoms covers a broad phylogenetic domain. We argue that the true extent of this domain has been obscured by researchers having overlooked the biological essence of veno...

Featuring several mentions of this excellent paper www.cell.com/trends/ecolo... by our colleague Ronald Jenner.

Scientists directly date dino eggshells for the first time The new findings narrow age estimates for the clutch of eggs—and may help identify which species laid them

As we're all taught, you can (usually) only directly date the age of a rock if it cooled from lava.

But here, scientists have dated dinosaur eggs, using uranium-lead ratios in the calcite. Hugely exciting, maybe groundbreaking.

My take @science.org

www.science.org/content/arti...

‘Incredible’ fossil reveals earliest relative of lizards and their kin Paleontologists use x-rays to reconstruct ancient reptile bones too fragile to remove from rock

Some 241 million years ago in what is now England, a tiny, lizardlike creature had teeth well suited for snapping after insects.

Now named Agriodontosaurus helsbypetrae, this extinct reptile may be the oldest of its kind ever found. https://scim.ag/3V75MC5

A submerged water anole (Anolis aquaticus) with a bubble of air held on its head. Photo credit: Lindsey Swierk.

Water anoles take a bubble of air down when they submerge, which they breathe like a tiny scuba tank, and now @lindseyswierk.bsky.social & co reveal that the reptiles may also be using the bubble like a gill, to breathe oxygen directly from the water

journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Anderson Feijó examining rodents in the collections of the Field Museum. CREDIT: Field Museum

Thumbs are cool and all, but have you ever thought about how important thumbnails are? They just might have been the key to rodents' evolutionary success. That and more of the best from @science.org and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪

Jokes on you, that's his treadmill

Thank you very much! ☺️

Me too! 😂

thumbs up!!! 👍

Our paper on rodent thumbnails is out! Big team effort, powered by museum collections. Turns out, nails can reveal a lot about rodent evolution. Shoutout to Dr. Gordon Shepherd for the wild idea to study rodents thumbs!