Alec Wilken

It's so great to see this project come out. I'm very grateful to my collaborators, Callum Ross, Chelsie Snipes, and Zhe-Xi Luo. We're appreciative of the support from the University of Chicago and the NIH

And we estimate that a shift to tympanic hearing in our lineage likely occurred in early cynodonts (8/n)

Armed with the knowledge that the tympanic membrane could conduct sound even on a ear attached to the mandible, we performed some phylogenetic analyses (7/n)

...meaning the tympanic membrane was the most sensitive conductor of sound for Thrinaxodon (6/n)

We found that the tympanic membrane transmitted the most sound pressure... (5/n)

By doing this we could capture the middle ear biomechanics of a 250 million year old animal! (4/n)

Here we used FEA to test how effective various potential sound receivers on the mandibular middle ear of a generalized cynodont like Thrinaxodon could be (3/n)

Our middle ear evolved from the jaw joint of our earlier synapsid ancestors. How did our ancestors hear with an ear rigidly attached to the jaw? (2/n)

🚨New paper alert🚨 Check out our new paper on the biomechanics of hearing in our cynodont ancestors! pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/n)

Paramyxoviruses in Old World fruit bats (Pteropodidae): An open database and synthesis of sampling effort, viral positivity, and coevolution Author summary Paramyxoviruses are a family of viruses that include the human measles and mumps viruses as well as emerging zoonoses like Hendra and Nipah henipaviruses. These henipaviruses spill over...

We created a database of all published paramyxovirus detection attempts in pteropodid bats! Lots of sampling gaps and avenues for future study ⬇️ Excited to share this PhD chapter with @danjbecker.bsky.social and @viralemergence.org, out last month in @plos.org 🦇🦠🔓

journals.plos.org/plosntds/art...