Matt Friedman

Events — Museum of the Earth

"Good things don't end with eum, they end with mania..."
-Homer

How about both? Today is Fossilmania at the Museum of the Earth where they are giving away decommissioned specimens today: www.museumoftheearth.org/visit/events

Vetulicolian studies. Cambrian weirdos #sciart

The Fossilized Birth Death Process with heterogeneous diversification rates unravels the link between diversification and specialisation to a carnivorous diet in Nimravidae (Carnivoraformes) Bayesian phylogenetic inference uses more and more complex diversification models as tree priors to test new macroevolutionary hypotheses. However, those models are usually developed in a neontologica...

First post here to show a bit the work I did with Joëlle Barido-Sottani and Hélène Morlon on phylogenetic diversification models with heterogeneous rates in a Fossilized BD Framework
🦴:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
The paper is still under review but the method is already available in BEAST 2 !

Opportunity to manage one of the world's great herpetology collections and join the outstanding community of museum folks here at U-M! 🐍🦎🐢🐊🐸

Models of jawless fishes swimming in a diorama.

School of Pteraspis in a diorama at the KU Natural History Museum for #FossilFriday

Great spotlight on our recent @currentbiology.bsky.social paper!

www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(25)01167-4

Assistant Professor in Paleontological Vertebrate Evolution - HigherEdJobs Jobs in higher education. Faculty and administrative positions at colleges and universities. Updated daily. Free to job seekers.

Rutgers is looking for a vertebrate paleontologist: www.higheredjobs.com/details.cfm?...

Emily standing at a table filled with fish specimens

Fish specimens on a tray. From left to right: pike, seahorse, monkfish, bamboo shark

Small preserved boxfish on a tray.

Preserved fish on a table. Top is a large swordfish skull. Bottom are left to right: porcupine pufferfish, burrfish, batfish

Showing off the @ummnh.bsky.social Fish Collection for ID Day! #TeamFish

Group of smiling people squinting in bright sunlight standing in building atrium in front of large pterosaur model.

Three people sitting behind a table with assorted specimens, including partial bison skull. Large window behind table shows a university campus in bright sunlight.

Photograph of building atrium taken from second floor. Large pterosaur is suspended from ceiling, with tables covered in specimens along the walls of the first floor.

Great paleo showing at today's ID Day at the U-M Museum of Natural History!

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.

So excited and grateful to receive R24 NOA from NIH ORIP to create an integrated #zebrafish omics, histology and microCT 3D atlas!

Looking forward to an exciting work with Dr. Postlethwait of U of Oregon, who is the co-PI of the grant.

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.

Another fish gig!

Crinoid with "feathered" arms, long stem and holdfast root system.

This is the only "complete" crinoid in my collection, from holdfast to crown.

It's easy to see why they are sometimes called sea lilies, even though they are animals related to starfish and sand dollars.

This is Abatocrinus gallatinensis from the Mississippian Lodgepole Fm of MT.

#FossilFriday

Congrats!

New in @science.org, meet Acronichthys maccagnoi, a new species from Late Creatacous Canada that changes what we know about the origins and evolution of one of the most successful fish groups on Earth.

Check out this rare faculty-curator position at OU:

Educational Program Coordinator II - East Lansing, Michigan, United States Position Summary The program coordinator will maintain the planetarium, present live shows, and create new planetarium visualizations. In addition, this position will assist customers, assist in educa...

If any of you fine folks are planetarians in (or want to be in) mid-Michigan, the Abrams Planetarium is hiring a full-time-staff position for the first time in 11 years!! Come work with the astro, scicomm, and informal ed folks at MSU!! 🔭 🧪 (reskeets welcome) careers.msu.edu/jobs/educati...

And giving tours is definitely one of the highlights of this gig.

Our paper on perceptions of punctuated equilibrium - including suggestions for how to teach about this essential evolutionary concept - is now available online! doi.org/10.1017/pab....

New paper alert!!!🚨 in our new study we find that Antarctic icefishes added a new module in their skulls during their adaptive radiation special shout out to @mayaranevesbio.bsky.social who led this project!

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

Hello #fish 🐟 🐠 researchers and PIs of tomorrow! We would be excited to sponsor you for an Ecology, Evolution and Behavior (EEB) Presidential #Postdoc Fellowship application @michiganstateu.bsky.social. Application deadline is Nov 10, so get in touch soom!

#EndlessFishMostBeautiful

Deeply unfair 😐

Dinosaurs Didn’t Just Disappear; They Took Entire Landscapes With Them When dinosaurs vanished, forests spread, rivers stabilized, and Earth’s landscapes flipped Let’s travel back in time. We’re now at the end of the Cretaceous period,...

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid ended the dinosaurs

But their disappearance didn’t just change life, it changed the land

Without them, forests spread, rivers stabilized, and Earth’s landscapes flipped

We’re the ecosystem engineers now
What world will we leave behind?
🧪
buff.ly/4KhsAJk

Alas, I don't think that'll happen. Their braincases are too "open plan": not much mineralized beyond the occipital arch and bits of the otic capsules 😔

Dorsal, lateral, and ventral views of Chiloglanis kinsuka, new species, holotype, AMNH 283315, 69.7 mm SL, female, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kinshasa, Kinsuka Rapids. Photo by T.R. Vigliotta. Scale bar equals 0.5 cm. Inset photo, lower right: coloration in life, AMNH 268960.

Dorsal, lateral, and ventral views of Chiloglanis wagenia, new species, holotype, CUMV 95972, 45.4 mm SL, male, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Orientale, Lualaba River at main portion of Wagenia Falls. Photo by T.R. Vigliotta. Scale bar equals 0.5 cm.

Two new species of African suckermouth catfishes just dropped! Say hello to #Chiloglanis kinsuka from the lower #Congo River at the Kinsuka rapids below Pool Malebo, and #Chiloglanis wagenia, from the Wagenia Falls at Kisangani, more than 1600 km upstream.🐟🧪

digitallibrary.amnh.org/items/3ad0dd...

Tongue-bite apparatus highlights functional innovation in a 310-million-year-old ray-finned fish | Biology Letters Gill-skeleton modifications for processing prey represent a major source of functional innovation in living ray-finned fishes. Here we present the oldest actinopterygian tongue bite, derived from the ...

All that and more came out of a single (slightly underwhelming looking) Carboniferous fish skull. I suspect (read: know) that many early ray-fin heads will hold other kinds of surprises, so I’m going to keep on scanning. OA paper here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

Cladogram depicting steps associated with the origin of the robust tooth plates of Bobasatrania, plus other evidence linking this group with Platysomus.

Platysomus also shows how the tongue bite was built bit-by-bit, starting with the several separate plates in the “tongue” of our specimen, to consolidated plates in later species, to truly massive, robust plates in Bobasatrania.

Line drawing of skull anatomy of the Early Triassic Bobasatrania from Nielsen (1952).

Apart from highlighting functional diversity in early ray-fins, this work helps clear up a systematic problem. This complex apparatus–combined with other features found inside the head of Platysomus–firmly link ‘platysomids’ and bobasatraniids (deep-bodied fishes that survived the P/T extinction).

Diagram showing stratigraphic ranges of ray-finned fishes with tongue bites or similar mechanisms.

This kind of mechanism has evolved many, many times in actinopts. But it seems like Platysomus was the first ray-fin to figure it out. (N.B., a lineage of lungfishes were even earlier–in the Middle Devonian–because early lungfishes were evolutionary overachievers).