Stephanie Drumheller

Bite marks on a section of the neural spine of a dorsal vertebra from the #IsleofWight iguanodontian dinosaur Brighstoneus simmondsi. Trace fossils transporting you back to a short space of time 125 million years ago. #FossilFriday

Clustering crocodylian dental morphology: Insights into functional adaptations, diet, and ontogeny - Testin - Journal of Anatomy - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The crania of 400 dire wolves at La Brea, brown fossils against a yellow background

The wolf wall at La Brea displays the skulls of 400 dire wolves, a fraction of the number in the museum’s collection. Current research includes looking into wolves from the “tough times” pits, when Aenocyon wore down and broke more teeth by chewing bones more often. 🧪

Elucidating the thermometabolism of Thalattosuchus superciliosus (de Blainville) Young, Brignon, Sachs, Hornung, Foffa, Kitson, Johnson & Steel, 2021 (Archosauria: Metriorhynchidae): a paleohistologic... Metriorhynchidae Fitzinger, 1843 constitue un groupe emblématique de crocodylomorphes dont le mode de vie marin et pélagique a longtemps suscité l’intérêt des paléontologues. En effet, tant leur...

Elucidating the thermometabolism of Thalattosuchus superciliosus (de Blainville) Young, Brignon, Sachs, Hornung, Foffa, Kitson, Johnson & Steel, 2021 (Archosauria: Metriorhynchidae): a paleohistological study. Comptes Rendus Palevol 24 (17): 333-344. doi.org/10.5852/cr-p...

Close up of a small clerid beetle on the postorbital of a large alligator skull

A clerid beetle, visiting our crocodylian decomposition research site:

Shark Week bills itself as pro science and conservation and says they don’t promote fear.

One of these 2025 episode titles is real and I made up the rest.

Guess which is real.

1 Great white assassins

2 Great white sex battle

3 Great white invasion

4 Florida’s death beach

Lolz all real

3 people bending over a wood framed, chicken wire box cobraining decomposing crocodylian remains. All are situated in a clearing in a wooded area.

A colleague took a somewhat tasteful photo of my students (Hannah Maddox and Owen Singleton) and I looking over our current decomposition experiment.

I'm looking forward to sharing the research, but I recognize that the photos are a bit grim for general consumption.

#livefromthefield
Work resumes on "Scorpio" the Lambeosaurus lambei whose quarry was reopened last year. While last year we collected the skull, this year the body blocks are revealing vast swaths of skin underneath! Exciting!

🚨 New paper published!
We report multiple cases of osteomyelitis (bone infection) in sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Cretaceous of Brazil. The fossils show different patterns of reactive bone growth, but no healing — the infections were active when they died. 🧪⚒️

👉 doi.org/10.1002/ar.7...

Don’t forget that the abstract deadline for #2025SVP #SVP2025 is tomorrow!

vertpaleo.org/abstract-sub...

Pulling together a couple of years' worth of reptile decomposition research with some comparisons to and geochemical analyses of fossil examples (mostly "Dakota" and "Leonardo").

SVP 2025 announcement banner with text reading: "Society of Vertebrate Paleontology 85th annual meeting Wednesday November 12 - Saturday November 15 2025 International Convention center, Birmingham, UK"

After much waffling about whether I was going to attend, I've just submitted an abstract for SVP 2025 on the dinomummy team's ongoing nonsense. I guess that means I'm committed.

Pit wear, but not the kind deodorant leaves on your old tees.

Bones inside ancient asphalt seeps rub against each other over time, thanks to the gloppy nature of the tar. Isolated and jumbled bones score each other, creating what looks like bite marks but is actually damage left long after death. 🧪

YouTube video by BBC Studios Attenborough - Baby Caymans hatching - BBC wildlife

Not me making myself cry watching baby caiman hatch.

They're just sweet little babies 😭

It was a monumental effort to try to quantify employment trends in US paleo. Please give it a read and see how your academic society can help address these issues. Huge thanks to @fossilexpress.bsky.social @fossilsndcoffee.bsky.social @jkimmig.bsky.social Sandy Carlson and Elizabeth Petsios

Earliest amniote tracks recalibrate the timeline of tetrapod evolution - Nature Analysis of a fossil trackway from the earliest Carboniferous of Australia shows prints of toes with claws, suggesting that the origin of amniotes was at least 35–40 million years earlier than pr...

Fossil trackway evidence for amniotes ("reptiles") MUCH earlier than previously supported by the fossil record, in Early Carboniferous rocks (358-347 mya) of Victoria, Australia. Big congrats to John Long et al. on this important discovery! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🐾🦎🪨⚒️

Great information, but I do wish we had more data on the biology side of things. Vert paleo has always leaned that way, and a huge number of my cohort has landed in gross anatomy positions in medical schools.

Fossilized specimen of the bird-like dinosaur Cratoavis, with boxes and arrows indicating clusters of fish bones preserved inside its body.

Evidence of fish-eating in the enantiornithean ("opposite bird") Cratoavis: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🪶🧪 (📷Salgado et al.)

Citations from Google Scholar of two papers: Yan, F., Zhang, J., & Yang, J. (2024). Crocodile optimization algorithm for solving real-world optimization problems. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 32070. Liu, C., Wang, J., Liu, Z., Zhao, Z., & Zhang, G. (2024). Design and movement mechanism analysis of a multiple degree of freedom bionic crocodile robot based on the characteristic of “death roll”. Journal of Field Robotics, 41(8), 2650-2662.

Applied and basic science rely on one another, often in very unexpected ways. Hamstringing one will invariably hamstring the other. My bite mark work has been cited in the forensics literature. These papers cite my crocodylian death roll survey. Let us freaking cook.

YouTube video by 2025 Sagaing Earthquake Archive First fault rupture ever filmed: M7.9 surface rupture filmed near Thazi, Myanmar

Alright everybody, go update your intro to geology, natural hazards slides: youtu.be/77ubC4bcgRM?...

Giant croclike carnivore fossils found in the Caribbean Imagine a crocodile built like a greyhound -- that's a sebecid. Standing tall, with some species reaching 20 feet in length, they dominated South American landscapes after the extinction of dinosaurs…

News from Episode 217:

Surprising fossils of predatory land crocs from the Caribbean, and later in geologic history than expected.

Scientists discover 2 new species of crocodile hiding in plain sight A crocodile DNA study has revealed two previously unknown Crocodylus species in the Caribbean. The crocodiles live on Cozumel and Banco Chinchorro, where they're threatened by human activities.

News from Episode 217:

Genetic analysis reveals potential hidden species of living crocs in the Caribbean.

Crocodilian moms are awesome mothers!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the human moms out there today!

🐊

Perhaps not as easy as on extant flesh, but yes we can see quite a bit! @uglyfossils.bsky.social is my favorite expert on the topic, as in this study

They were very tasty!

3 strawberry crepes on a plate with almonds on top

My husband interrupted me reading/reviewing a dissertation to give me Mothers' Day crepes.

Work/life balance? Never met her. 🤦‍♀️

A chocolate cake with red and white decorations and lit candles shaped as the number 75. Bold text reads: ‘The NSF Turns 75 Today. What has it done over the past 7 decades?’ The background is a celebratory red with a spray-paint texture.

HAPPY 75th, NSF!

We’re celebrating this milestone by highlighting some of NSF’s most transformative accomplishments—innovations that have shaped our world and continue to drive progress in health, technology, the environment, and beyond.

Read on 🧵(1/11):

Close-up of fossil Triceratops hips (MOR 799) showing deep punctures left by a tyrannosaur bite

You know I love a good bite mark, and these are some of my favorites. A Tyrannosaurus fed on a Triceratops carcass, leaving deep punctures in the hips. 🧪

Fossilized vertebral column and rib bones embedded in a large, triangular slab of rock on display in a museum exhibit case. The specimen appears to be from a prehistoric marine reptile or dinosaur, with visible rib structures extending outward from the central spine.

Happy #FossilFriday! This is part of the tail of an #Edmontosaurus (#MOR007) from the Upper #Cretaceous #HellCreekFormation of #Montana. Study of this fossil revealed that show duck billed #dinosaur had a segmented frill along the top of its body.

This was one of our grad students.