Dr. Advait M Jukar, FLS

What was your AI policy for this course? I love the idea and want to do something like this myself but my trust in students not using AI is deteriorating

Having only seen the first episode, I thought they did a pretty good job of sticking with the fauna from a couple of formations, and to me at least, it seemed temporally and geographically cohesive

🦖 Free Webinar: 200 Years of Vertebrate Paleontology in South Asia
Join Dr. Advait Jukar for a fascinating look at the history and future of vertebrate paleontology in South Asia.
📅 March 11 | 12-1 PM ET
🔗 Register: anatomy.org/ANATOMY/Meet...

Last week, amidst the hoopla over a new Speen, @fishfetisher.bsky.social suggested a review of naming papers in fancy journals in response to a post by @daveyfwright.bsky.social - I got bored after work and now I have (some) data!

🧵👇

#FossilFriday
#CharismaticTaxaAreOverrated

Graphic with two parts, a map and a chart. Top section: A map showing intact tropical forests in northern South America, most of them in the Amazon River basin. Three locations are called out: 1 is in Panama; 2 is on the eastern border of Ecuador, near the borders with Colombia and Peru; and 3 is in Brazil, on the Amazon River. Undisturbed tropical forest areas are defined as areas where no disturbances were detected in a comparison of satellite imagery from 1990 to 2024. Bottom section: Dot plot with confidence intervals. For each of the three map locations, the chart shows the average annual change in mist net captures for insectivores and for the total bird community. For all three locations, the average annual change for insectivores is in the negative and is lower than for the total bird community.

Intact tropical forests are seeing mysterious bird declines. Is another “silent spring” brewing?

Learn more: https://scim.ag/4aCs0Er

Surprising partner preference found in matings between Neanderthals and modern humans Male Neanderthals tended to pair up with female modern humans, but whether intercourse was consensual is unclear

Surprising partner preference found in matings between Neanderthals and modern humans | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was strongly sex biased Sex biases in admixture and other demographic processes are recurrent features throughout human evolution. For admixture between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans (AMHs), sex bias has been p...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Acceleration hotspots of North American birds’ decline are associated with agriculture Human activities might have accelerated declines of population abundance, but this acceleration remains underexplored. Using 1033 North American Breeding Bird Survey routes, we analyze abundance chang...

Thrilled to share our new paper out in @science.org, led by François Leroy and Petr Keil! Using the Breeding Bird Survey, we document not only a continent-wide decline in bird abundance since the 1980s — but, crucially, the acceleration of these declines over time. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Richard Bambach on his first day in his office at the National Museum of Natural History in 2005.

Obituary for a great paleobiologist Richard Karl Bambach (18 May 1934–20 June 2025) who infused the large-scale functional approaches to paleobiology and paleoecology.
doi.org/10.1017/pab....
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

Degradation of fish food webs in the Anthropocene The decrease in body size driven by the selective species turnover is widely altering fish food web topology and function.

New paper out examining fish food web degradation in the Anthropocene. We show the structure of aquatic food webs are changing-- even when species richness doesn’t. These signals are strongly associated with decreases in body size within fish communities. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🌐🐠🐡🦈🐟

Scimitar-crested Spinosaurus species from the Sahara caps stepwise spinosaurid radiation We describe a close relative of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, the sail-backed, fish-eating giant from nearshore deposits of northern Africa. Spinosaurus mirabilis sp. nov., discovered in the central Sahara...

Introducing Spinosaurus mirabilis, a new species of Spinosaurus found in the heart of Niger on our 2022 expedition. It sports a long crest on its head and was found in a basin environment near a river system 500-1000km from the nearest prehistoric marine shore.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The billion-dollar case for sustaining palaeontology’s digital databases - Nature Ecology & Evolution The authors survey community palaeontological databases, documenting their contributions to science as well as their vulnerabilities, and provide recommendations for the future of open science databas...

New paper emerging from our Paleosynthesis project @paleosynth.bsky.social.
In www.nature.com/articles/s41..., we highlight the value of databases to #paleontology and the importantce of sustained funding. Our finding are probably applicable to other science fields as well.

Silesaurs may have been early ornithischian bird-hipped dinosaurs, a group that would include Triceratops (pictured) when dinosaurs reigned. Image credit: Shutterstock/Alberto Andrei Rosu.

#Paleontologists are on a mission to pinpoint the dawn of the #dinosaurs. What early evolutionary steps set the stage for the animals’ impressive reign? A PNAS News Feature: https://ow.ly/nocW50YbEU7

#Lewisuchus #Triassic #Silesaurus #ornithischians #extinction

Parasagittal

Cellular-level preservation of cutaneous spikes in an Early Cretaceous iguanodontian dinosaur - Nature Ecology & Evolution A juvenile iguanodontian from the Lower Cretaceous of China preserves both spikes and scales in its skin that are different from integumentary structures in either non-avian dinosaurs or extant squama...

Huang, J., Wu, W., Mao, L. et al. Cellular-level preservation of cutaneous spikes in an Early Cretaceous iguanodontian dinosaur. Nat Ecol Evol (2026). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

“Rather than treating [academic] job ads as prescriptions, we frame them as signals — shaped by departmental needs, institutional pressures, and broader social moments. This gives a clearer picture of the demand side of academic archaeology”

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

India Sees Its Grasslands as 'Wastelands.' Ancient Poems Show Otherwise The sprawling grasslands of western India are, in the popular imagination, the remains of woodlands that were leveled under British rule — areas to be reforested, rather than conserved. But a recent analysis of stories, songs, and poems from centuries past reveals that western grasslands predate British colonization.

The grasslands of western India are, in the popular imagination, the remains of woodlands lost under British rule — areas to be reforested, not conserved.

But an analysis of medieval songs and stories reveals the grasslands predate British colonization.

More than 43,000 years ago, Neanderthals spent centuries collecting animal skulls in a cave; but archaeologists aren't sure why Neanderthals repeatedly returned to the cave to store horned animal skulls, revealing this cultural tradition was transmitted over time.

More than 43,000 years ago, Neanderthals spent centuries collecting animal skulls in a cave; but archaeologists aren't sure why www.livescience.com/archaeology/...

Illustration titled "Mastodon Giganteus" from 1852, showing detailed black-and-white drawings of several fossilized mastodon bones. The bones, labeled Fig. 1 to Fig. 6, include long limb bones and joint fragments with rough textures and surface irregularities. Each bone is displayed with anatomical accuracy, highlighting their size and structure. The top of the page states "Plate XXV" with a scale indicating one inch to a foot. The illustration provides a scientific view of the extinct North American mastodon's skeletal features for study.

🦣 The Mastodon giganteus of North America /.
Boston: J. Wilson, 1852..

[Source]

It’s not entirely new. If you look at the table of measurements, several historical specimens from the Marsh Collection are in there. The Yale Stegosaurus is objectively huge. But I suppose no one had done a systematic analysis before.

☄️New Paper!!☄️just out in Geology, in which we re-calibrate the ages of the earliest planktic foraminifera to evolve after the K/Pg mass extinction and found that new species began to appear within 2,000 years (YEARS) of the impact:

pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/...

Mummified cave cheetahs inform rewilding actions in Saudi Arabia - Communications Earth & Environment Naturally mummified cheetah remains in a Saudi Arabian cave system with radiocarbon-calibrated ages between about 4,200 and 100 years cluster with Asian as well as West-African sub-species, with impli...

Mummified cave cheetahs inform rewilding actions in Saudi Arabia

www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Cross-section images of the leg bone of an extinct flightless bird, with close-ups taken through a microscope.

Bone histology of phorusrhacids (terror birds) indicates rapid, uninterrupted growth (typical of most modern birds but unlike flightless paleognaths such as ostriches and kiwi): anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... 🪶🧪 (📷Dreyer et al.)

Long museum case with complete phytosaur skeleton centered, larger phytosaur skull to the left, and some sort of slab to the right. Chalk drawings above.

Long musuem case with Lycaenops and dicynodont skeletons, assorted therapsid skulls on the wall

Square museum case with Allosaurus, Camarasaurus, and other skulls. Header says Jurassic Dinosaurs: The Morrison Fauna.

Museum case with partial Diplodocus skeleton. It's a pelvis with some dorsal and caudal verts on either side and one attached femur. A skull on a stand beneath.

Some display cases in the old brontosaur hall at AMNH (1956–1990)

a diagram showing the environment of the fossil site. Volcanoes, swamps, and geothermal vents can be seen

a REALLY cool paper was just posted that describes a new lagertätte from La Rioja Provence, Argentina: A extremophile microorganism site with 3d arthropod bits and plants in a Geothermal field. This site also produces large vertebrate material and sauropod nests. www.frontiersin.org/journals/eco...

Contrasting evolution of the Arabian Sea and Pacific Ocean oxygen minimum zones during the Miocene - Communications Earth & Environment The Arabian Sea and eastern tropical Pacific oxygen minimum zones were better oxygenated during the warm Miocene, but with regional complexities, according to analysis of trace elements and nitro...

🚨New paper out with @alexauderset.bsky.social! We show that the Arabian Sea oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) was better oxygenated during the warm Miocene Climate Optimum than today, but its path to full deoxygenation was slow and complex.
Link to paper: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Stay turned for an updated age for the Huntington mammoth using the latest and greatest techniques! (4/4)

#FossilFriday

If the bone preserves enough collagen, it is a good candidate for carbon dating! A small piece of the bone (in this case, a fragmentary rib from the Huntington Mammoth) is cut off using a dremel, weighed, and taken to her collaborator’s lab for analysis. (3/4)

Her process includes pre-screening the fossils using infrared spectroscopy, where she’s essentially using light to look for collagen preservation in the bone. (2/4)

New science on the Huntington Mammoth for #FossilFriday!

Yesterday, Dr. Christina Ryder visited our museum to sample fossils for carbon dating. Dr. Ryder and her collaborators are interested in the extinction of Ice Age megafauna in North America, including critters like mammoths & mastodons. (1/4)