Makes a lot of sense with how many fossil holocephalians converged on "shark" bauplans, but still really cool
Illustration comissioned by Erica @gutsickgibbon.bsky.social for her wonderful video on co existance of Early Homo and Australopithecus lineages at Ledi Geraru.
Link to the video: m.youtube.com/watch?v=CQvC...
I will never tire of seeing your takes on extinct hominins 🔥
Let's goo
Couldn't have happened to a more deserving artist🔥
This is the most incredible footage of blue whales I’ve ever seen
Always been one of my favourite pieces of yours 🔥
I mean, yes, fun dinosaur stuff is fun dinosaur stuff. But Myhrvold is mentioned in the recent batch of Epstein files over 1000 times (far more than Horner). Some of the correspondence between the two is very chummy and concerning. See: www.seattletimes.com/business/loc....
Haolong dongi, the “Porcupine” Iguanodont. At about 2.5 meters long, not much would stand out about this Hadrosauroid had we just their skeletal remains, but thanks to the preservational nature of the Yixian Formation, we’ve come to uncover amazing details about the anatomy of this animal #sciart 🧵>
Pretty sure nothing happened to this individual. The guy had guns in his hotel room. SVP knew he was an issue in advance and instead of rejecting his abstract, they asked him to edit it to not name specific people in his weird manifesto.
Looking forward to people finally getting to see what we've been working on all this time - I couldn't be more proud of the way this film is turning out and to be a part of it
Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below!
Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage
New paper just dropped finally describing a complete specimen of Dakosaurus maximus and what a beauty it is. Some highlights, in addition to this being a long time coming, is the presence of bitemarks on the face and chondrichthyan material in the stomach
doi.org/10.26879/1577
The first chapter of my PhD is published! If you're interested in how bones can be buried in floods, check it out in Paleobiology! (doi:10.1017/pab.2025.10087) And if you want to see the full scale experiments we ran, I did a summary video featuring a cover of When the Levee Breaks! #Taphonomy
Result from the Agate Fossil Beds #paleostream!
This early Miocene lagerstätte from Nebraska (USA) is a fantastic window into our understanding of the transition from forest communities to grassland biomes...
One dramatic advance in evolutionary biology over the past 20 years has been the empirically lead shift in thought, away from rigid species boundaries towards introgression being very common, much of it adaptive. The ramifications are still rippling out (e.g. in ConBio). Below is a nice addition:
Excited to announce that my second manuscript, “Fossilised Melanosomes Reveal Colour Patterning in A Sauropod Dinosaur” has been published in
@royalsociety.org !! Diplodocus scales are complex and diverse, and it turns out their color patterning was even more so. A 🧵🦕 1/26
Some days ago I made a thread on Pleistocene crocs in honor of Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age, and now I'm bringing it here too.
Let me prefice this by saying that I of course understand their absence, obviously more unique fauna takes priority and I don't begrudge the team their choice
A male Nanotyrannus lancensis sports their sharp and contrasting breeding season colors. They lift their head up and catch the whiff of the promise of hope... a female...
Steppe lion enjoys the last days of summer.
But mornings are getting colder, winter is coming.
Be weary of the beardogs! These swift pack hunters are not to be taken lightly. New update (backers only) posted to our Kickstarter! Link in thread
This is super cool (both the study and the artwork). Link to the paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Wang, W., Shang, Q., Wang, J. et al. Earliest long-necked sauropterygian Lijiangosaurus yongshengensis and plasticity of vertebral evolution in sauropterygian marine reptiles. Commun Biol 8, 1551 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s420...
Yes, the #PrehistoricPlanetIceAge trailer is out today...
The amount of AI generated art in slides at this conference, primarily used by older scientists, is killing me. Scientists please. Don’t use these ai platforms to make your figures or slides. They look bad and I have yet to see them meaningfully improve the message of talks.
My latest for @nytimes.com! For 40 years, paleontologists have grappled over whether a small tyrannosaur — named Nanotyrannus — was its own animal, or simply a teenage T.rex. The debate has been ... contentious. Which is why it's so fun to finally be able to say this:
Folks? Nanotyrannus is real.
The newest Dinosauria short film -- set in the early Jurassic Kayenta formation of Arizona -- takes inspiration from gothic fairy tales and horror. It fucking rocks, man
The naturalist Jane Goodall died today at 91. Hope, she argued, is not merely “passive wishful thinking” but a “crucial survival trait.” Revisit a conversation with Goodall, from 2021: nyer.cm/F55JtsS
NEW blog post! The evolution and fossil record of narwhals and belugas - the white whales! Emphasis on the surprising fossil record of belugas and the evolution of the bizarre tusk in the weirdest modern cetacean. 🐬🧪🦖 #whaleontology Read it here: coastalpaleo.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-...
Large penguin from the Tangahoe Formation (Pliocene of New Zealand), a member of the same genus as extant king and emperor penguins: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... 🧪🪶 (📷 @atennyson.bsky.social et al.)
