April Wright

A schematic explaining the analytical pipeline for using DeepDiveR and DeepDive. DeepDiveR helps users to convert their fossil data into the appropriate input format for DeepDive, as well as to prepare the configuration file describing the analysis settings. These two files can then be run in the Python library DeepDive. DeepDive uses the data to simulate diversity curves and sampling scenarios, and trains a model on the relationship between the two, allowing subsequent inference of the ‘true’ diversity curve from an incomplete and biased empirical fossil record.

Interested in inferring biodiversity in deep time? 📈📉 Check out our new R package DeepDiveR, led by @rebeccasaurus.bsky.social and now published in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social, helping you to prepare datasets for machine learning inference with DeepDive 🤿
doi.org/10.1111/2041...

Late Cretaceous origins for major nightshade lineages from total evidence timetree analysis Background and Aims The timing of the radiation of nightshades (Solanaceae) has been contentious in the literature, with estimates of the crown age ranging from ca. 30 to 70 Mya (mid-Oligocene to late...

It posted more than a week ago, but I finally find time to share my work with @iochromaland.bsky.social and @rociodeanna.bsky.social on the divergence times of Solanaceae! It has been one of the greatest collaborations in my lifetime with two inspiring scientists! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Back in the south for like a week and I only saw one snake. Bullllllllllshiiiiiiiit.

Going through the same (down to the fact that she and I both prefer green). I’m just fortunate that her father is tall, so she can’t do it forever

The US could see a 30-40% decline in new international student enrollment, resulting in nearly $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer American jobs. https://www.nafsa.org/fall-2025-international-student-enrollment-outlook-and-economic-impact

Octavia Butler has a piece I assign to all grad students who are writing up: A Positive Obsession.

The gist: Do it poorly. Do it weird. Do it until writing feels natural and you can’t live without it.

Get the awful first draft out and build from there.

a man in armor is standing in front of a group of people and says death . ALT: a man in armor is standing in front of a group of people and says death .

And so our month of no children ended in DC with a bar crawl, an excellent meal, and a great time with friends

We made such an end

You do not want to be an academic that carries the reputational stain of using GAI to do your thinking. At least, I don't.

I would like that my colleagues believe that my writing reflects my thinking.

Vonnegut mastered the medium. We can go nowhere but down

Absentmindedly putting my phone to the pay terminal at the grocery, then realizing it’s set to my bus pass

I’m such a provincial, paying with my phone still shocks me

I either need to stop pausing my runs to look at dead things by the trail, or stop being honest about what I'm doing.

I am not making friends very effectively with the other runners.

A Shared Challenge: Evaluating AI’s Impact on Open Research Infrastructure OSF was designed to make open scholarship possible and easy to adopt, while upholding the values of transparency, credibility, and accountability. As we navigate the evolving role of AI in research, C...

Open infrastructures align transparency and rigor. By increasing the ease of sharing, researchers are more accountable to rigor, and readers are better able to evaluate it.

AI can upset that alignment creating a big challenge for open infrastructure.

www.cos.io/blog/evaluat...

In 1965, Margaret Dayhoff published the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure, which collated the 65 proteins whose amino acid sequences were then known.

Inspired by that Atlas, today we are releasing the Dayhoff Atlas of protein sequence data and protein language models.

I love watching someone just barely make their train

While I'm at it, here are the types of success each institution wants:

SLAC: Be a rockstar at everything (teaching, research, leadership, community).

R1: Be an internationally-important scholar with a keyboard that prints grant money.

RPU: Do whatever you want, just improve the lives of students.

I know bars and restaurants think I have money because I’m pushing 40. But playing a downtempo sad girl version of Dancing On My Own is not how you get me to part with it

Runs up and hands you some good looking math books

It took my “recovering” goth husband longer than expected to catch it!

Her sister saw her having all this fun in the water and charged in after her. The. She realized she doesn’t like water and stood, stock stiff, until rescued

Standing on the beach, leash in my hand, staring at the hound, staring at the sand

The Fossilized Birth Death Process with heterogeneous diversification rates unravels the link between diversification and specialisation to a carnivorous diet in Nimravidae (Carnivoraformes) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.15.664897v1

Blast radius survivors: The lizards that endured the cataclysmic asteroid strike A Yale-led study has found that night lizards, small reptiles that inhabit North and Central America, survived the extinction event that wiped out most life on Earth — despite living near ground zero.

“GenBank and other federal repositories fuel curiosity-based science. They are public libraries of vast amounts of information that allow scientists to perform research without needing large grants. They’re invaluable to improving our understanding of the world.”

news.yale.edu/2025/07/11/b...

A mounted skeleton of the dicynodont, Lystrosaurus, on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France.

Here’s a snapshot of the plucky little #dicynodont, #Lystrosaurus on display at @mnhn.fr for this #FossilFriday. This distant forerunner of mammals was one of the few animals on land to survive the worst mass extinction event of all time, the Permo-Triassic extinction.

#paleontology #science

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🚨🚨🚨PUI TT Job Alert!!

My dept at TCNJ is hiring a tenure track cell and molecular biologist. Come join my supportive colleagues, helpful staff, & fabulous students!

We're surprisingly well resourced w/excellent equipment (confocal, SEM etc) and research w/students counts towards our teaching load!

Mammals Evolved into Ant Eaters 12 Times Since Dinosaur Age, Study Finds

Press release out today on our new paper detailing the convergent origins of obligate ant and termite eating in mammals!

Will anyone review this paper? Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review Scholarly publishing relies on peer review to identify the best science. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even ...

1. Kevin Gross and I just posted a new science-of-science preprint.

This one explores the looming peer review crisis. As many of you know, it's becoming significantly more difficult for journal editors to find scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for submitted manuscripts.

Among the more striking things in Gooseberry Falls State Park are the totally bonkers thirst trap statues of Civilian Conservation Corps workers.

The Duluth area has had incredibly cool jobs before. It can again. Invest in people so we don’t need jails.

Photo by Adam Cole

I should take a beat and tell you how proud I am of @basantakhakurel.bsky.social. After having been graduated (MS in my lab) for two years, he jumped back in about two weeks ago, reproduced my plots and figures, then remade them to be much more readable and pretty. Grad student extraordinaire.

featuring @peterjwagner3.bsky.social, @basantakhakurel.bsky.social, and @brenenwynd.bsky.social and Christian Kammerer.

Incorporating continuous characters in joint estimation of dicynodont phylogeny Continuous characters have received comparatively little attention in Bayesian phylogenetic estimation. This is predominantly because they cannot be modeled by a standard phylogenetic Q-matrix approac...

Updated preprint! Thanks to suggestions from reviewers, we have some new insights on using continuous traits in phylogenetic estimation.

And a lot more about dicynodont taxonomy. Seriously, google dicynodonts and tell me you don't want to know what's happening there

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