Mark Wright

Thrilled to be featured on the cover of @devdynamics.bsky.social

highlighting our 2 anole studies published:

anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
&
anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Thanks so much @thomsanger.bsky.social for hosting me when I took this image!

I think "break" is the right question, but I think now is the wrong time to ask it. Until we get Lina Khan back in charge of the FTC, the current focus should be on protecting people and building power. E.g., local pressure on politicians (e.g., Frey, Waltz) to arrest ICE officers who break any law.

I want every person working for or with ICE, at every level, tried for felony murder. This is now the compromise position.

Four camera-type eyes in the earliest vertebrates from the Cambrian Period:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Art: Xiangtong Lei & Sihang Zhang

When @omearabrian.bsky.social saw the manuscript, he described it as: ‘What if this figure could be an entire paper?’

I choose to interpret that as high praise.

Now accepted at AmNat: The geometry of macroevolution (with Dan Rabosky). www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

I’m convinced that current AI is only “smart” enough to do things that already don’t take that long to do. The most practical utility I’ve ever gotten from them is as a glorified search engine.

The AI model kept trying to give me a solution instead of telling me that the workflow I was trying was not possible, which would have been far more productive.

Anyways, I went back to just reading documentation from the start.

I once tried to solve a complex R coding problem with ChatGPT.

I lost about an hour to “Sorry, this is the actual name of the function from this package instead” before I gave up, opened the documentation, learned that what I wanted to do didn’t exist, and found a workaround (10 mins).

Mayor Jacob Frey: “To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”

I’m excited to be the first ever Artist-in-Residence at #SICB2026! Stop by the @sicbjournals.bsky.social booth during the poster session to chat with me about scientific art and take home some swag with my artwork on it! 🐡

If I saw a "murder hornet," I'd be running in the other direction. But these wee frogs think they're tasty snacks—even though they get stung repeatedly while consuming them. That story and more from @science.org and science in this edition of #ScienceAdviser: www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪

Two quail embryos. The individual on the left has dark pigment in it's eye while the individual on the right has no visible pigment in the eye.

Two leopard gecko embryos. The individual on the left has dark pigment in it's eye while the individual on the right has no visible pigment in the eye.

I was collecting #quail #embryos this morning and found an individual with albinism! Look at the lack of pigment in the retinal epithelium! Reminds me of finding a leopard #gecko embryo with the same condition during my PhD.

Multicolored CT model of a fossil cichlid skeleton. Image credit: Austin Babut (project technician).

Do you like cichlids? Fossils? Fossil cichlids? Would you like to study them as part of a graduate degree at the University of Michigan, joining an NSF-funded project? Get in touch.

Yesterday I discovered that ChatGPT's PhD-level expertise didn't extend to bird anatomy. This morning I thought, perhaps I was being too hard on the half-trillion-dollar company. Birds are a little weird, anatomically speaking. Let's try something more familiar. A mammal. Behold.

Grade F level diagram of an ostrich skeleton. The pelvis is labelled as a humerus, and sternum appears to be labeled as the pelvis.

The team of Ph.D. level experts in ChatGPT apparently doesn't include any anatomists.

The way I convert has always been to start from:
0 C = 32 F
Then, every +10 C is +18 F

So,
10 C = 50 F
20 C = 68 F
30 C = 86 F
(+5 C is +9 F for filling in increments between when needed)

Adaptive landscapes unveil the complex evolutionary path from sprawling to upright forelimb function and posture in mammals The ‘sprawling-to-parasagittal’ postural transition is a key part of mammalian evolution from non-mammalian synapsids. This study uses evolutionary adaptive landscapes to reveal parasagittal postures ...

I'm so excited to share my latest paper out now! How did the ancestors of mammals make the switch from sprawling to upright, taking over the world in the process? Spoiler alert; it's complicated! journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

1. Knowledge of what’s local (and how to care for it)
2. Not having any areas that I control

The motivation to figure out the first would be there if the second wasn’t the main barrier

Thank you, Bouwe!

Today, my successfully defended dissertation was accepted by ProQuest in its final, correctly-formatted version! What a journey it has been to get to this point. #PhDone

His training schedule in this interview:
-Wake up at 8:30am
-Start training day at 9:30am
-Workout, lift, recovery
-Sleep all afternoon
-Wake up at 10pm
-Work UPS until 4am
-Sleep 3 hours, wake up, repeat

It's still early in the season, but he's run the fastest time in the world so far this year

YouTube video by CITIUS MAG Jacory Patterson Talks Job At UPS + Racing Unsponsored After 43.98, 2nd In Long Sprints At GST Miami

Biggest story IMO from the first two meets of Grand Slam Track so far:

Jacory Patterson, unsponsored athlete and UPS driver, wins the 400 in Miami this weekend becoming the 26th fastest guy in history (43.98). Finishes 2nd in the Slam, takes home $50k. That's life changing

youtu.be/QJ4AhRONMjk?...

Bone microstructure supports a Mesozoic origin for a semiaquatic burrowing lifestyle in monotremes (Mammalia) | PNAS The platypus and four echidna species are the only living egg-laying mammals and the sole extant representatives of Order Monotremata. The platypus...

Early Cretaceous fossil of a humerus from a monotreme indicates semiaquatic burrowing lifestyle as in platypus (and echidna):
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Congrats!!

🚨 HISTORY LOADING... 🚨

Nike has announced that on June 26th, triple Olympic 1500m champion and mile world record holder Faith Kipyegon will attempt to do what no woman ever has: run a sub-4-minute mile.

Kipyegon currently holds the WR at 4:07.64.

💻 Read more: citiusmag.com/articles/fai...

Graphical abstract for "The Diffusion Diaries: Diffusible Iodine-Based Contrast-Enhanced CT for Vertebrate Natural History Specimens", showing the number of scans : "252 scans of 205 specimens from 7 natural history collections" a plot showing how staining time increases with mass, log-transformed (bottom left), a pie chart showing the Tissue Condition scores (TCS) recorded for all specimens (bottom middle), and a screenshot of a lab protocol for diceCT'ing museum specimens (bottom right)

Cover image for Integrative Organismal Biology, showing cross sections through a fish, a tenrec, a frog, and a lizard at the bottom of the image, and a 3D rendering of each animal at the top of the image (colored in teal, grey, yellow, and pink, respectively)

🚨New publication alert!🚨 A big one! It might just be my *biggest* one: doi.org/10.1093/iob/... IMPORTANT THREAD! From the moment Dave Blackburn set me loose at the Florida Museum, I had a marvelous time using diffusible iodine-based contrast-enhanced CT (diceCT) to create anatomical datasets 🧪1/6

Shelly-Ann racing in her kid's Parents Day race at the school is the funniest thing I've seen all week LMAO

Not-periodizing means leaving a little bit of fitness on the table, for example, if you have a goal marathon you are working towards, but it’s pennies compared to other stuff (like total volume)

Others have touched on this, but it depends on goals. Periodization is mostly for elites (at least college level) to optimize peaking for a particular race. For most folks (especially those running for health/fitness), better to do what keeps you motivated with down weeks as the body needs it.

A photo of a pygmy possum clinging to a human thumb. The animal has a curly pink tail and somewhat resembles a light brown mouse.

Behold the western pygmy possum! This dainty marsupial typically weighs ~0.5 oz (14 g)—that's about as much as a AA battery! It inhabits treetops in forests throughout parts of Australia. As a nectarivore, it mainly feeds on plant nectar.
Photo: gilliank, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist