Z. Jack Tseng

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

Students presenting posters of their research

Great day at the UW Undergraduate Research Symposium!

Over the last two years, my mentees learned to develop hypotheses, collect data, code, and present results. All of this would not be possible without NSF support.

Yeah…☹️

Read this w/ mixed feelings: the success of integrative approaches to studying evolution sped up the disappearance of disciplinary hires in areas such as paleo. UCMP’s 5 full time vert paleos now down to 2.

Candidates w/ paleo training need to be centered in a more popular field to improve chances.

Our report on employment is out in Paleobiology
(They did let us append that the paper was accepted before the election/changes to NSF and other granting agencies)

Employment in paleontology: status and trends in the United States | Paleobiology | Cambridge Core - www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

TANK vs TESLA

"We've crushed fascism before and we'll crush it again"

- ⁠WW2 veteran Ken, 98, in the tank

A graphic for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), showing a historical portrait of Marie Skłodowska-Curie overlaid with an image of four young researchers walking down a hallway. The European Commission logo is in the top left. Text reads: "Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – €404.3 million to support postdoctoral researchers”

Choose Science. Choose Europe.

A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open.

With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond.

Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF

The Royal Ontario Museum is hiring a new collections manager! Please spread the word.

Collections Specialist 2: Fossils (Vertebrate Paleontology) - Royal Ontario Museum - Careers

t.co/CTtfs3MBMB

Congratulations!

Scott Pelly of 60 Minutes says Paramount is interfering with their reporting on the Trump administration because they want Trump to approve a merger and that prompted the resignation of executive producer Bill Owen’s.

Neil deGrasse Tyson was accused of sexual misconduct by 4 women. He’s keeping all his jobs. The American Museum of Natural History just concluded its investigation, and Tyson is staying.

reminder that neil degrasse tyson is a creep www.vox.com/2019/7/29/89...

Assessing the application of landmark-free morphometrics to macroevolutionary analyses - BMC Ecology and Evolution The study of phenotypic evolution has been transformed in recent decades by methods allowing precise quantification of anatomical shape, in particular 3D geometric morphometrics. While this effectiven...

Thrilled to share my second PhD paper with @tomezard.bsky.social & @evoswami.bsky.social focused on the application of landmark-free geometric morphometrics! 🎉 Excited to contribute to advancing shape analysis techniques in biology. Check it out here: doi.org/10.1186/s128...

#WithoutNSF we would not have the means to both strengthen scientific ties with allies and understand & learn about our competitors during the formative early career stages of an American scientist. I did the former through DDIG and the latter through EAPSI, both now discontinued in my field.

For the last 3 yrs, I was the director for the Science of Science program at the NSF. We funded projects on science communication - science communication to the public, communication of public priorities to scientists, citizens engagement & participation in science. 🧵

We get to keep @narimanechatar.bsky.social here for two more years of mammal masticatory madness!!!

New 🦦 paper in @anatrecord.bsky.social! I quantified the growth curves of theoretical bite force & jaw musculature in sea otters. Newly weaned otters are at a disadvantage in foraging until the early stages of adulthood when they reach full skull & biting maturity

doi.org/10.1002/ar.2...

Inside me there are two wolves. One of them has a 15 genome edits the other 20 genome edits. Neither of them is a dire wolf.

Pieces of grayish white P.O.S. obscuring scientific information provided by an institution of higher education.

#FossilFriday Eocene coprolites from the Chocolate Mound locality, Jefferson County, Montana. Not to be confused with its extant counterparts in Washington D.C.

Christine M. Janis, Alberto Martín-Serra, Jessica M. Theodor & Craig S. Scott (2025)
Down to earth: therian mammals became more terrestrial towards the end of the Cretaceous
Palaeontology 68(2): e70004
doi: doi.org/10.1111/pala...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🌎 Join us for a full day of family-friendly activities celebrating our home planet at EarthFest—including Identification Stations for your discoveries! amnh.link/3G2vaUY

Our National Science Foundation funded work, led by @chrislaw.bsky.social, continues to decipher trade-offs in complex biological systems. These projects add new phenotypic data with which to understand how evolution works in the past, present, and future.

Had a blast presenting our work on carnivoran adaptive landscapes at #AnatomyConnected25!

Read more here: academic.oup.com/iob/article/...

#anatomy25 @tsengzj.bsky.social @hlusko.bsky.social

🎉🎉🎉🎉Congratulations Eugenia!!!

Excited to be part of this article in PNAS ably led by Alec Wilken and @crocholliday.bsky.social Holliday presenting results of our NSF grant on the interplay of brain expansion, jaw muscle reorientation, & cranial kinesis in bird evolution.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
bit.ly/3FxEYGC
📷: U Chicago

I’ve sat with the B. morrisi skull at AMNH for months and still couldn’t get onboard with that hypothesis…no obvious muscle scars in front of the IOF, and as you said, it’s not THAT big indeed. I had hoped to test it w FEA, but the internal morphology is not well preserved…

Some or all of those could be possible anatomical/behavioral correlates of the large IOF! But it’s difficult to explain why Barbourofelis and not other sabertooths…

A brown replica of a T. rex sits on a table in front of a lecture hall with rows of blue seats. Students are seated sporadically throughout.

A person in a dark blue shirt holding up a small T rex skull and standing in front of a mounted skeleton of a much larger T. rex. A white spiral staircase wraps around the back of the skeleton and leads to the floor above.

#FossilFriday teaching the @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social non-majors course on Mesozoic life with Jane the teenage T. rex this week, followed by a field trip to see the Wankel T. rex in front of @ucmpberkeley.bsky.social!

😍