Z. Jack Tseng

Claude, an American alligator with albinism, lounging on his favorite heated rock.

It's with heavy hearts that we share that Claude, our beloved albino alligator, has passed away at the age of 30. Claude brought joy to millions of people at the Academy and across the world during his 17 year tenure. We will miss him dearly. 🤍

The @societyofvertpaleo.bsky.social
Annual Meeting #2025SVP was an absolute blast! Great to reconnect with European colleagues this year, and to hang out with EDDy Lab folks again. I presented some of our ongoing work on #teeth #biomechanics. Stay tuned, more toothy madness on the way! 🦷

The emergence and diversification of dog morphology Dogs exhibit an exceptional range of morphological diversity as a result of their long-term association with humans. Attempts to identify when dog morphological variation began to expand have been con...

While the range of physical diversity dogs show is often thought to be the result of intense breeding over the last 200 years, a new Science study suggests domestic dogs began developing their distinctive forms thousands of years before humans started shaping modern breeds. https://scim.ag/4nVRhNq

The Dogs of 8,000 B.C. Were Amazingly Diverse

Maybe the explosion of diversity among dogs didn't really start in the Victorian era! "Now, a new analysis of canine skulls spanning the last 50,000 years suggests that even early dogs came in an array of shapes and sizes." #dogs #bioarchaeology #archaeology #anthropology

Safe travels all #2025SVP folks! En route to Birmingham via London…and who am I to argue with the NHM’s kids pack swag? 😁

Bringing up baby: preliminary exploration of the effect of ontogenetic niche partitioning in dinosaurs versus long-term maternal care in mammals in their respective ecosystems Mesozoic dinosaurs and Cenozoic mammals are often regarded as broadly ecologically equivalent, as they included the majority of medium-to-large-bodied terrestrial vertebrates of their respective eras....

Fascinating new study from @arctomet.bsky.social about how differences in parental care (or lack thereof) between Mesozoic dinosaurs and Cenozoic mammals might potentially affect interpretations of species diversity and trophic abundance in ancient communities. 🦖🧪

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting

I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

salamander phylogeny with representative limb bones and their cross-sections

New PhD preprint! We studied the effects of habitat and multi-stage life cycles on salamander limb bones! Aquatic and terrestrial spp. have divergent morphs + semi-aquatic and multi-phasic spp. do their own thing + decoupled external and internal shape promote diversity. 🧪🦎

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

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-...

Support for preregistration and registered reports at Historical Biology In this editorial, I will update the readership on the progress of the new ‘Registered Report’ article type, our support for preregistration, and how this furthers our goal of becoming an Open and ...

Interested in preregistration and registered reports? Historical Biology supports both! My new editorial on these developments:

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

We’d also like to highlight research conducted with fossils from this locality by international scholars who are utilizing new technology like 3D scanning which allows us to work with fossils in new ways and have a digital record that increases accessibility to these fossils.

Image of three brown and black fossil jaw fragments of extinct weasel relatives, Leptarctus, with short but sharp cusps. Open access paper at https://doi.org/10.5070/P9.48360

Celebrating #NationalFossilDay with a new paper describing specimens of the most whimsical of weasel relatives, leptarctine ("slender bear") mustelids, from the collections of @ucmpberkeley.bsky.social.

Their teeth are so much fun to look at! 🦷
doi.org/10.5070/P9.4...

(Cover image by P. Holroyd)

This is a reminder that you are cordially invited to join in tomorrow's SVP Town Hall meeting. The topic will be SVP Annual Meetings Beyond Birmingham and Guidance for Potential Future Host Committees. This town hall is open to all, whether they are attending, not attending, or still deciding on attendance. President Stuart Sumida will also be joined by Dr. Sandy Carlson who will chat briefly with us about SVP's membership in AGI, the American Geosciences Institute. Please join us tomorrow, October 15, 2025, at: U.S. 9:00 AM Pacific U.S. 12:00 PM Eastern U.K. 5:00 PM GMT+1 Central Europe 6:00 PM GMT+2 I look forward to seeing you at the above-mentioned time. Stuart Sumida, SVP President

SVP members, please check your email for a copy of the message below that includes the link to access to the October 15 town hall hosted by SVP President @stuartsumida.bsky.social. We look forward to seeing you there!

Hi Bluesky, I need your help. Please share broadly:

We have an EXCELLENT job opening. We are looking for a non-Brazilian visiting scholar who specializes in Genomics applied to animal evolution, biogeography, and/or biodiversity. This is a one-year contract that can be extended for up to 4 years.

Functional microanatomy of nasal turbinals in bats Iodine-enhanced micro-CT (diceCT) scanning allows visualization of whole bat heads (a, showing Anoura geoffroyi) as well as internal structures such as nasal turbinals, including their mucosal coveri...

Probably more than you ever wanted to know about #bat turbinals, in our most recent paper – check it out!
anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

We're excited to share a new Special Issue on sabretooth taxa, broadly defined. From defining what makes a sabertooth/tusk to exploring fossil taxa and saber function.
anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/19328494...
Volume edited by Hartstone-Rose, Werdelin & Pollock

Excavated from the Pisces Point locality of Scollard Formation in Alberta, Canada, ~67 million years old, Acronichthys maccognoi, newly reported in @science.org, was recovered from ancient water body that flipped seasonally between fast-flowing channels and quiet, still pools.

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

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🐟

The Univ. of Nebraska’s Dept. of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences has established a webpage soliciting the community’s help in saving their program. Their hearing in front of campus admin is next Friday, Oct 10th. Please consider sharing why they’re essential!

eas.unl.edu/save-earth-a...

Brawn before bite in endemic Asian mammals after the end-Cretaceous extinction The first 10 million years (Myr) following the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction marked a period of global greenhouse conditions and dramatic rise of placental mammals. Because ~80% of known...

New preprint: Brawn before bite in endemic Asian mammals after the end-Cretaceous extinction. #Paleontology #Mammals #Extinction

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

TLDR: S. China mammals diversified dentally, tracked environment, then leveled up bite mechanics all within the first 10 m.y. post K-Pg.

Labeled museum bone specimens representing the foot of a raccoon scattered over a gray table top.

Studying wrist and ankle bones for fossil id and found it amusing how carpals have wired names like magnum and unciform but tarsals have tired names like cuneiform 1, 2, 3. Like they ran out of cool names for bones by the time they got to feet 😆

Two new papers on fossil carnivorans. Old collections continue to offer new insights! @ucmpberkeley.bsky.social & IVPP

Late Miocene immigrant carnivorans in California...
www.vertpala.ac.cn/EN/10.19615/...

Eco-functional divergence of Crocuta and Pachycrocuta...
www.vertpala.ac.cn/EN/10.19615/...

Raising a single malt for Mark today...

It's the missing link to canid origins that the experts have obviously not considered...more reason why 'we can't trust experts'?

New paper out today lead by @tsengzj.bsky.social where we test the 150-year-old hypothesis that the unique jaw torus in Nimravus is an adaptation to resist bite forces using FEA🦁🔪our results highlight some functional advantage of the torus, which are amplified at larger gape doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

Assistant Teaching Professor - Human Anatomy- Department of Integrative Biology University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

The Department of Integrative Biology @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor of Human Anatomy! Open until September 19. Please share with anatomy/paleo/func-morph colleagues and friends. Happy to answer any questions. aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05053

Long-fuse evolution of carnivoran skeletal phenomes through the Cenozoic Climatic change is hypothesized to promote phenotypic diversification. While neontological analyses are often used to test this hypothesis, extant data only captures the time-averaged signal of surviv...

New preprint with @tsengzj.bsky.social & @hlusko.bsky.social! Here, we developed the most comprehensive phenomic dataset of extant and extinct pan-carnivorans to test how Cenozoic climatic change influenced the evolution of the cranial, appendicular, & axial skeleton

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Supplemental Feeding as a Driver of Population Expansion and Morphological Change in Anna's Hummingbirds Bird beaks are highly adaptable, with the potential to undergo rapid morphological shifts in response to environmental change such as climatic variation or food availability. Anna's Hummingbirds (Cal...

🚨New paper alert!🚨
We show that hummingbird beaks have changed in shape & size since around WWII, driven by the rise of commercialized feeders! 🧵
📄 Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb....
#ornithology #evolution #GlobalChangeBiology