Sarah Davis

Two psilopterine terror birds squabble over a bit of food, backed by a rocky outcrop.

A psilopterine terror bird stands tall above tufts of dry grass, with a calm but ferocious expression on its face.

Of all the wonderful depictions of Pleistocene life shown in Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age, few can compare with the beauty and realism of these psilopterines. I don't think I'm exaggerating to say this is the first and only time terror birds have been done properly in a documentary.

🐊 Largest survey of skeletal disease in living crocodilians! Nearly half showed osteopathologies, w/trauma most common. Skulls were hit hardest, and non-traumatic issues like inflammation and joint degeneration rose w/size & age.
Cornille et al.:
anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

🌟 Volunteer Opportunity! 🌟

Sedimentologika is currently undergoing a transition to an open-source LaTeX based proofing and production workflow.

We are advertising a volunteering position for one (or more) assistant production editor.

Send your application at contact@sedimentologika.org

USAJOBS connects job seekers with federal jobs across the United States and around the world as the official employment site for the federal government These positions may be filled for a six month seasonal period, but can vary due to weather conditions, project needs, or funding. Anticipated Entry on Duty: <strong>April 2026</strong> <p>For more par...

New seasonal paleontology positions available for Dinosaur National Monument, Petrified Forest National Park and Fossil Butte National Monument. Apply soon, they close after they receive a certain number of apps! #NPSpaleo #PaleoJobs

www.usajobs.gov/job/850816000

www.usajobs.gov/job/850816700

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

Infographic about the Paleontological Research institution. 94 years of research here. One of the 10 largest fossil collections in the USA, with 7 million specimens. 1.2 million users of their online content annually, 30,000 in person visitors 1,500 teachers use PRI for continuing education each year link to donate: https://www.priweb.org/donate

Infographic explaining that PRI needs to raise 1 million dollars by December 31st to pay off their mortgage, be free of that debt and continue future operations. They have already raised 2.1 million of the 3.1 million needed to pay this unexpected expense due to a major donor being unable to fulfill a long-term pledge

Some infographics about the Paleontological Research Institution, its continuing impact on research and education, and what is needed to keep this place around into the future after a major donor was unable to keep a pledge.

Keep them in mind! #FossilFriday #givingTuesday ⚒️🧪🦑

www.priweb.org/donate

As I have been working with mammals a lot lately, I have had a lot of thoughts about how fur, feathers, or any other filaments affect the silhouette.
A coelophysis with feathers and without. Two completely different animals.

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:

For anyone who can live in Flordia, a great opportunity in an amazing collection:

FMNH is looking for an experienced full-time Collections Manager II or III as Director of Invertebrate Paleontology Collections within the Department of Natural History.

🧪⚒️🦑
explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53...

A crop of a larger image, seen here are common species to the Mojave Desert in a typical desert landscape. At the top going clockwise: Common Raven (Corvus corax) Phainopepla (male) (Phainopepla nitens) California Quail (Callipepla californica) Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) And he has a tasty dead lizard.

lil crop of some birbs.
A bunch of the illustrations were sketches, most of them not in color. But coloring this rougher stuff was actually pretty fun~

#birds #sciart #mojavedesert

a drawing of two coyotes encircling one another protectively with growling expressions on their faces. text from large impact speech bubbles from each coyote say "speak up for your neighbor"

SPEAK UP FOR YOUR NEIGHBOR.

conveniently printer paper sized. in case you want to spread the message or something

A striped dinosaur with fluffy tail, jumping in front of red moon and catching a long-tailed early bird

"Cretaceous Thriller"
Sinocalliopteryx: the bird-swallowing dinosaur 🪶

Collections Study Grants Collections study grants provide financial assistance for graduate students and post-doctoral researchers to study the collections of the University of Washington Burke Museum (UWBM).

New Collection Study Grants for students and postdocs to come visit the @burkemuseum.bsky.social! Applications due 12/15/25. www.burkemuseum.org/collections-...

Low angle shot of a trio of Yutyrannus stalking through the shallow water of some hot springs, closing in on a solitary sauropod, Dongbeititan.

Yutyrannus trio closing in on Dongbeititan 🦕 inspired by how the original material for Yutyrannus was a trio of individuals possibly indicating social behavior, and then the limited material for Dongbeititan includes a rib bone with a theropod tooth embedded! #paleosky #yutyrannus #dongbeititan

The Comparative Analysis of Lineage-Pair Traits Abstract. For many questions in ecology and evolution, the most relevant data to consider are attributes of lineage pairs. Comparative tests for causal rel

Now available in Systematic Biology, a new paper (and R package) in which we outline an approach to account for non-independence in comparative analyses of lineage-pair traits academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

The importance of palaeontology, Earth history, and science The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology discusses the significance of paleontology, Earth history and science in this insightful opinion piece

SVP President @stuartsumida.bsky.social speaks to Open Access Government about the importance of vertebrate paleontology and science in the United States.

www.openaccessgovernment.org/the-importan...

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

Classic meeting spot 😌

A job ad with multiple images, including the exterior of the museum, a view of collections (jars on shelves), and pictures of some cool, tropical fish but I don't know enough about fish to describe them other than to say they're pretty colors of yellow and blue/green

🚨We're hiring! The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is seeking a tenure-track split position as Assistant Curator of Ichthyology and Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences. Please retweet & share with colleagues! 🐟🐠🧪

Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/174674

And that's how you integrate digital elements into an exhibition. Part of the temporary "China's Dinosaur World" at the Shanghai Natural History Museum, China. Closing this November.

Video source: Shanghai Let's Meet

What are the biggest questions in #paleontology? New paper out today in Paleobiology led by Smith & Kiessling with ~200 coauthors on the relevance of our field, methods, & museum collections to climate & biodiversity research🦖 #FossilFriday @paleosoc.bsky.social 🔗: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

A carnival-like exhibit entrance with a dinosaur skull, coelacanth model, and pantodont skeleton in cases under freak show-style banners labeling them as "Mesozoic terror" and "the fish that wouldn't die'

I was asked yesterday to post a walkthrough of Life Over Time, the shortest-lived and generally weirdest iteration of the Field Museum’s fossil halls. If you visited between 1994 and 2004, this is the version you saw. I’ve got some time, so let’s do this.

The Megaraptor Had Giant Claws and an Appetite for Crocodilians

For the @nytimes.com, I wrote about Joaquinraptor, a new species from a very cool family of dinosaurs: long-armed, hook clawed (possible) tyrannosaur relatives from South America

Moncrieff Lab | Bird Evolution The Moncrieff Lab is a research lab based at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. Research in the lab involves museum specimens, fieldwork, and...

🐦🔬 Recruiting PhD students! 🌎🧬
I’m looking for 1–2 PhD students to join our team starting Fall 2026 at the Sam Noble Museum & University of Oklahoma.

Our research: 🐦 birds • 🌍 biogeography • 🌴 Neotropics • 🧬 population genomics • 🌱 speciation

👉 Learn more: www.moncriefflab.org

Please share!

Fossil of a small extinct bird with feathers preserved around its skeleton.

For #NationalHummingbirdDay, 47-million-year-old Parargornis from Germany was a proto-hummingbird with short wing feathers like a modern hummingbird but a short, broad skull like their cousins, the swifts. Perhaps hummingbird ancestors started hovering before they drank nectar. 🪶🧪 (📷Mayr)

From Dinosaur Scratches to Insects in Amber, How Paleontologists Uncover Prehistoric Courtship Researchers have found fossil evidence of varied creatures wooing and mating, as they continue to search for the telltale signs of dinosaurs copulating

Canoodling sharks, dinosaur display arenas, and turtles who perished in the middle of the act, I'll tell you about the fossil record of courtship and mating in my latest for Smithsonian.

The Greatest Extinction Event in 66 Million Years? Contextualising Anthropogenic Extinctions Species and ecosystems are changing rapidly in response to human actions, but how does this compare with the deeper past? We review and compare the current extinction event to those over the last 66 ...

"Precluding major reductions in the current extinction rate, we are witnessing what will become the greatest extinction event since the demise of the non-avialan dinosaurs 66 million years ago." 🧪

October 1 deadline for @nhm.org Student Collections Study Award. Get some $$ to spend time collecting data in our collections, including @tarpits.org
Open to:
- current undergraduate and grad students
- *not* local to Los Angeles (international applicants welcome)
More:
nhm.org/student-coll...
🧪