Rachel Warnock

Postdoctoral researcher for DFG-funded project “FossilGaitSim” The Biomechanical Motion Analysis and Creation (BioMAC) group at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) invites applications for a postdoctoral position with the goal to…

My research group has an open position for a postdoc! Interested in investigating the postural transition towards mammalian gait using movement simulations? We might have the right position for you! More details and application info here: www.asm.tf.fau.de/en/2025/11/1...

My manifesto for outreach officer at the PalAss

I am running for the outreach officer position for the @thepalass.bsky.social this year (manifesto in image).

If you are a member, please check your mail and consider voting in the AGM. Several important roles are up for election with great candidates looking to work for our community.

PhyloWeaver – Interactive phylogenetic tree editor Edit and visualize phylogenetic trees directly in your browser. PhyloWeaver lets you interactively rearrange tree topologies and export high-quality figures for publications and presentations.

I’ve released a tool to sketch and edit phylogenetic trees!
yawak.jp/PhyloWeaver/

Load a Newick file and intuitively add/remove/resize branches.
Useful for quick conceptual trees, extracting subtrees, or turning ideas into Newick.

New paper by Amy Shipley and Lydia Woods DeepBio@Leeds PGRs Amy Shipley and Lydia have published a review on the sixth mass extinction, as part of a working group on Cenozoic extinctions led out of the Anthropocene Biodiversity Centre at …

PGRs Amy Shipley (@sauropodlets.bsky.social) & Lydia Woods recently published a review in @globalchangebio.bsky.social showing that while today’s extinction rates aren't yet at "Big Five" mass extinction levels, they’re likely the highest seen in the last 66myrs.

amdunhill.co.uk/2025/11/17/n...

ACCE+ DLA Programme: Morphological Trait Evolution in Isolated Populations of Large Mammals and its Implications for Rewilding in the UK at University of Liverpool on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - ACCE+ DLA Programme: Morphological Trait Evolution in Isolated Populations of Large Mammals and its Implications for Rewilding in the UK at University of Liverpool, listed on FindAPhD.co...

Anyone interested in applying for PhDs at #2025SVP, email or find me or @tguillerme.bsky.social for a chat if you’re interested in morphological trait evolution with a conservation theme:
🔗 www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Flow diagram illustrating the workflow for the ppgm R package. It starts with an extant envelope, fossil data is added, the evolution of climate niche is modelled, and finally climate niche & palaeoclimate are matched to show potential range.

ppgm: an R package for integrating neontological, palaeontological & climate data in a phylogenetic comparative framework onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #SVP2025 @alexh-palaeo.bsky.social @datadryad.bsky.social @tamueccb.bsky.social

Want to do a PhD linking palaeontology, ecological modelling and polar ecosystems? Look no further than this NERC GW4+ DLTP funded project with @rowanwhittlebas.bsky.social at @bas.ac.uk & @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social and others (inc me).

www.bristol.ac.uk/media-librar...

Reminder that my lab is seeking graduate students for fall 2026. As part of @oupaleobiology.bsky.social, my lab uses a combination of fossils, statistical phylogenetics, fieldwork, & computational approaches to investigate macroevolutionary dynamics in the marine biosphere. Link w/ more info below:

PhD position available in evolutionary genomics/bioinformatics (hoehnalab.github.io/job_adverts/...). Topic: analyzing gene expression evolution across several firefly species and linking expression changes to genomic architecture. The position is jointly supervised with @anaevolcatalan.bsky.social

PhD Topics - Entry September 2026 — The Foster Lab This year we are involved in 3 fully funded PhD projects via IGNITE our NERC DLA. The deadline is Thursday Jan 8th 2026 .  1.      Is the world already 1.5 C warmer?...

Fully funded PhD projects available in my group (Please share with interested parties, details here: www.thefosterlab.org/blog/2025/11...):

Interested in the @evojlinnsoc.bsky.social
special issue on phylogenomic discordance? tinyurl.com/v2eces3s 🧪

Three more summaries added below!

We'll return when more articles come live.

Again, all and any oversimplications are entirely my fault!

🔎 How can we measure and compare morphological diversity through time and across groups?
New Edition of the course: Introduction to the Analysis of Morphological Disparity

📅 January 6th–15th, 2026 (ONLINE)

JSP Landmark Papers in Vertebrate Palaeontology Explore the article collection: JSP Landmark Papers in Vertebrate Palaeontology. Published in Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

Delighted to share our special ‪collection of 24 landmark papers in vertebrate palaeontology published in @journalsystpal.bsky.social in the last 15 years, assembled to coincide with #SVP2025 #2025SVP. All these papers are free to access now and through November: www.tandfonline.com/journals/tjs...

Loss of macroevolutionary species fitness explains the rise and fall of clades - Nature Ecology & Evolution The interplay between speciation and extinction rates shapes clade diversity dynamics. Using a novel phylogenetic model that includes living and fossil lineages, the authors estimate speciation and ex...

Loss of macroevolutionary species fitness explains the rise and fall of clades 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

YouTube video by useR! Conference paleopal: A Shiny app for building data science workflows in paleontology - William Gearty

I've had such a great time talking about some of my recent #opensource and #openscience work at #useR2025, #USRSE25, and #GSAConnects2025 over the last few months!

If you missed it, you can watch the recording of my #useR2025 talk on YouTube.

#reproducibility #paleontology #datascience #Rstats

👏 Congratulations 👏 to the Big Questions team lead by Jansen A. Smith! After such a hard work the paper "Identifying the Big Questions in paleontology: a
community-driven project"is published in Paleobiology (doi.org/10.1017/pab.2025.10042)

Ten simple rules to follow when cleaning occurrence data in palaeobiology Large datasets of fossil occurrences, often downloaded from online community-maintained databases, are a vital resource for understanding broad-scale evolutionary patterns, such as how biodiversity h...

Just in time for #FossilFriday! Our paper is out today in Palaeontology @thepalass.bsky.social

Ten simple rules to follow when cleaning occurrence data in palaeobiology 🧹🦕

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Another great @palaeoverse.bsky.social team effort to offer a community resource!

How many plant species are buzz pollinated? After more than six years in the making, our paper on the convergent evolution of buzz pollinated flowers is out in @journal-evo.bsky.social. Thanks @draverbee.bsky.social @roszenil.bsky.social and all co-authors for your hard work! doi.org/10.1093/evol...

The Dawn of animal life: quantifying the origination animal mobility In this contribution, Emily Mitchell considers how animals first started to move.

How animals first started to move? Some insights by @egmitchell.bsky.social (@camzoology.bsky.social) using fossil records.
valuepast.hypotheses.org/4954

Cryptic species can be phylogenetically old despite strong sex-biased dispersal Abstract. The impact of strongly differentiated populations on species delimitation due to limited or sex-biased dispersal remains challenging and under-ex

Extreme female philopatry in Pachypus beetles reveals 14 cryptic species!
🧬 Our study shows ancient speciation (5.3mya) despite limited dispersal, linked to the Messinian salinity crisis. Integrative taxonomy uncovers hidden diversity. #Taxonomy #Genetics url: academic.oup.com/sysbio/artic...

🦕 For #PalAss members:
Are you planning to participate in #PalAss2025? 🌍
Don’t forget to check this option ✅

💡 All information can be found here ⬇️
🔗 palass.org/palaeontolog...

#palass #conference #bursary #possibility #apply

🚨 Last call!
Bayesian phylogenetic inference with BEAST2

📅 October 27 th – November 7th, 2025
💻 Online

#TScourses #KeepLearning

Identifying the Big Questions in paleontology: a community-driven project: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The first #leech body #fossil predates estimated hirudinidan origins by 200 million years

peerj.com/articles/199...

@peerj.bsky.social #Annelida

Ammonoid Paleobiology: From anatomy to ecology This two-volume work is a testament to the abiding interest and human fascination with ammonites. We offer a new model to explain the morphogenesis of septa and the shell, we explore their habitats by the content of stable isotopes in their shells, we discuss the origin and later evolution of this important clade, and we deliver hypotheses on its demise. The Ammonoidea produced a great number of species that can be used in biostratigraphy and possibly, this is the macrofossil group, which has been used the most for that purpose. Nevertheless, many aspects of their anatomy, mode of life, development or paleobiogeographic distribution are still poorly known. Themes treated are biostratigraphy, paleoecology, paleoenvironment, paleobiogeography, evolution, phylogeny, and ontogeny. Advances such as an explosion of new information about ammonites, new technologies such as isotopic analysis, tomography and virtual paleontology in general, as well as continuous discovery of newfossil finds have given us the opportunity to present a comprehensive and timely "state of the art" compilation. Moreover, it also points the way for future studies to further enhance our understanding of this endlessly fascinating group of organisms.

10 years ago, our co-edited Topics in Geobiology volumes on #Ammonoid #Paleobiology came out:

From anatomy to ecology:
doi.org/10.1007/978-...
From macroevolution to paleogeography: doi.org/10.1007/978-...

In the last months of 2025, i will explore new discoveries on these topics in a thread:

Just in time for #FossilFriday 🦖 What are the big questions in #paleontology today?

dx.doi.org/10.1017/pab.2025.10042

Nearly 200 scientists worldwide came together to map where our field is headed. Here’s the story 👇

Another years-long project I was a working group co-leader was published today as well!

Me, @lepidodendron.bsky.social and @rachelwarnock.bsky.social co-led the phylogenetics group and I had such a formative experience! ⚒️

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I am extremely happy to see that our review on fossil tip-dating is out in early view in Systematic Biology! A huge thanks to all the authors of this massive project (@heckeberg.bsky.social, @basantakhakurel.bsky.social, Gustavo Darlim, and @hoehna.bsky.social)! academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

‘Earth system engineers’ and the cumulative impact of organisms in deep time Understanding the role of humans as ‘ecosystem engineers’ requires a deep-time perspective rooted in evolutionary history and the fossil record. Howev…

When does biology become geology? This is a fun paper for us (although I, myself, was just one more member of Band-Aid for this particular paper), and hopefully it helps clarify a lot of things that we sort of already knew but never really formally addressed.

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

Job alert! jobs.open.ac.uk/job/Lecturer...