HeadLab (Jason Head)

Super cool experimental study demonstrating how warming and species richness alter mass-abundance structure of ecological communities.

Harms of introduced large herbivores outweigh benefits to native biodiversity - Nature Communications Using impact assessment frameworks, this study shows that the introduction of large mammalian herbivores outside their native range has predominantly caused negative impacts on native biodiversity globally. The authors advise caution regarding their further intentional introduction for conservation purposes.

Trophic rewilding depends on the assumption that replacing lost megafauna with alternative species can generate similar benefits. This new review by Bescond-Michel et al. challenges that belief. 🌏🌐🧪

I feel seen.

Marine origins and freshwater radiations of the otophysan fishes Otophysans, known for their enhanced hearing enabled by the complex Weberian apparatus, comprise two-thirds of extant freshwater fish species. Previously, they were thought to have originated in fresh...

Here you go!

John Atkinson Grimshaw, British (1836-1893), Twilight, 1871, oil on card laid down on panel, 56 x 38 cm, private collection

Who's got unfused parietals and probably wasn't a stem snake? This guy.

Mosaic anatomy in an early fossil squamate - Nature Breugnathair elgolensis gen. et sp. nov., an early squamate identified from a newly discovered Middle Jurassic skeleton on the Isle of Skye, provides new evidence on the origins of snakes.

Mosaic anatomy in an early fossil squamate, from the Jurassic of Scotland www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📣 New Publication!

Biodiversity supports functions that drive ecosystem services and disservices. Measuring these functions is key to evaluating conservation strategies and land use change.

We present methods to quantify ecosystem functions using the sentinel approach:
doi.org/10.1111/2041...

Alien, 1979. (Directed by Ridley Scott)

One of the best songs from one of the all-time great albums.

Δ47 water temperature of middle Miocene sabkha carbonate from IODP (International Ocean Discovery Program) Site U1464 (SAB-all) aligned with modeled summer half-year air temperatures in general circulation simulations with a middle or late Miocene configuration (39 model runs from MioMIP; Burls et al., 2021; Sarr et al., 2022).

We have a new paper (in GEOLOGY!)
Using a new way to look at sabkha sediments with clumped isotopes, we found that warming in the Miocene was not that significant in the horse latitudes. Most of the warming was likely in the high latitudes. 🧪⚒️

Link: pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/...

What could go wrong?

New specimens of the arthrodire Bullerichthys fascidens Dennis and Miles 1980 show incipient site-specific osteichthyan-like tooth addition and resorption - Swiss Journal of Palaeontology The arthrodiran placoderm Bullerichthys fascidens, from the Late Devonian Gogo Formation, Western Australia, was originally described from an incomplete headshield with only the spinal and interolater...

New paper out yesterday "New specimens of the arthrodire Bullerichthys fascidens Dennis and Miles 1980 show incipient site-specific osteichthyan-like tooth addition and resorption"

Read it now in Swiss Journal of Palaeontology: sjpp.springeropen.com/articles/10....

Bioturbation Shapes Marine Biogeochemical Cycling Following the End‐Permian Mass Extinction in Northern Pangea During the end-Permian mass extinction, a global decline in seafloor sediment mixing and burrowing (bioturbation) provides critical evidence for the collapse of marine ecosystems, likely triggered by...

🎉New paper with Brian Beaty: After the end-Permian ME, burrowers didn’t just return, they rewired seafloor chemistry.
Shallow particle mixing revived C & S cycling (<200 kyr); full P recycling waited on deeper burrowers (>1 Myr). Congratulations Brian!
paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

1000 elite biohackers using technology from the year 3000 and a mountain of LSD could not invent a creature half as bananas as the anteater

Yep. Old.

My blue is your blue: different people’s brains process colours in the same way Neuroscientists can predict what colour a person is looking at using a machine-learning tool trained on the brain activity of others.

My blue is your blue: different people’s brains process colours in the same way www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The decline of a great university THE ACADEMY IS AN OUTDATED CONCEPT TO THE IU TRUSTEES AND STATE GOVERNMENT By Mike Leonard Peaceful , beautiful and under attack. SUVs blowing through stop signs. Cars going the wrong way on one-wa…

Truth. And such a waste for the future of the state of Indiana after five generations of investment to elevate Hoosier kids to world class status. thebtownbee.com/2025/08/31/t...

And bovids are just a facilitating mechanism for the evolution of large body size in pythonids.

Bumping to the Fishes! and Science feeds🐟🧪

Humans have depleted global terrestrial carbon stocks by a quarter Land use has diminished global vegetation and soil carbon stocks, contributing substantially to global warming. Our research provides a consistent and unprecedentedly detailed global estimate of the t...

🌍 Humans erased a quarter of Earth’s carbon stores

Land use has depleted global vegetation and soil carbon by 24% (344 PgC), equal to 50 years of fossil fuel emissions.

🔗 www.cell.com/one-earth/fu...

#SciComm #ClimateCrisis 🧪

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

The 2025-26 Eco-Evo job list is out. Good luck to those applying!

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Next in our August issue: A Journal Club from Peter Doll, "Addressing disparities in global biodiversity data"

Web link: https://bit.ly/46YENzO

The Awkward Age, between 3 and 2 million years ago, was when early Homo rubbed along with at least two lineages of Australopithecus, and Paranthropus too. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Unraveling the role of environmental and anthropogenic drivers in shaping global patterns in mammal diversity vist.ly/32pcf #FunctionalDiversity #Macroecology #PhylogeneticDiversity

Quite troubling:

The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly | PNAS

@reeserichardson.bsky.social

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Hubbell's neutral model of biodiversity is founded on tree inventory data for Barro Colorado Island – which don't fit the model. A better one is the compound abundance distribution involving the geometric series. A preprint of the newly submitted BCI paper is here:

ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

A review for a Little Caesar’s somewhere by Kevin S: Stopped into this Little Caesars just trying to get a $6 pizza and ended up in a full on action movie. Just as I grabbed my order, this furious dude barges in yelling about how I cut him off in traffic earlier. Before I can even respond, he throws a punch but then out of nowhere the guy behind the counter jumps over it like he's been waiting for this moment his whole life and just beats the living hell out of the guy. The guy ran off and the cashier just dusted himself off. I said "are you ok man" and he looked me dead in the eye and said "B*tch, this is Little Caesars. We always hot and ready." Five stars. Will absolutely return.

I AM SHRIEKING 💀🤣

Forget the statue at City Hall, this guy is the *real* Spirit of Detroit. 🫡

A well-deserved award to a brilliant colleague and good friend!