Derek den Ouden, Paleosoricidologist

Stylized black fish set within a triangular frame. Background of the tile is orange-brown.

Fantastic tile featuring an early bony fish with strong Cheirolepis vibes. One of many stylized animals on the floor of the entryway rotunda at the KU Natural History Museum.

Extending mammal specimens with their essential phenotypic traits

doi.org/10.1093/jmam...

A new museum digitization effort unlocks traits from millions of mammal specimens

Digital illustration of some pelagornithid birds flying over a stormy sea with the start of a sunset in the background

Pelagornithids for an assignment a while ago
#palaeoart #paleoart #pelagornithid #birds

Burger BJ. Comparative spatial paleoecology: assessing niche competition between Eocene North American multituberculates and rodents regarding forest resources to elucidate the cause of multituberculate extinction. Paleobiology. Published online 2025:1-16. doi.org/10.1017/pab....

drepanosaur with featherlike structures on its back.

Weird dude update

Selection of animal figures.

Selection of animal figures.

Model leaf chameleon.

How good are the new #ToyMany Madagascan animals? Really good is the answer. Tenrec, chameleons, FIVE lemurs, leaf gecko, fossa, and more! Really impressed. #animalfigures

New Comparative Anatomy Textbook! Completely free to read and open access!

doi.org/10.59319/YHF...

YouTube video by Things Visible & Invisible Hunting Down the Cryptozoologists | Darren Naish

New for today is my #cryptozoology-themed interview at Things Visible and Invisible on YouTube. The title ('Hunting Down the Cryptozoologists') makes it sound as if I'm out to inflict some discipline! But, no, things are - I argue - way more nuanced, more complex... www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Luo...

The infamous Hell is Real billboard.

Black t shirt with white lettering saying " Hellbenders are real". There is an illustration of a hellbender amphibian above.

If you've ever driven down I-71 between Columbus and Cincinnati, you've seen this eyesore. Well, I just bought the next best thing.....

Put simply, groundwater pumping takes water that was safely locked up in continental aquifers and puts it in the larger water circulation system, which -- inevitably -- means it ends up in the sea

New study finds split oblique eye muscle insertions (bifid tendons) are unique to certain Carnivora, especially in cats and foxes. These may aid in precise eye movements—supporting sharp, forward-facing vision in predators.
Keiko Meshida et al.: anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

𝘖𝘳𝘦𝘢 𝘭𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘢 - An extinct Giraffid species from the Middle Miocene Chinji Formation of Pakistan, with the slenderest metatarsal of any known ruminants, represents the oldest definitive member of the giraffine lineage. Nikos Solounias & Maria Ríos (2025): buff.ly/LqW97Ky

#FossilFriday #PaleoSky #NHM

Its finally out! Please Welcome Mirasaura! A new drepanosaur from the Middle Triassic of France.
@serpenillus.bsky.social made the press artwork but I couldn't hold back and had to do my own interpretation during break time... =)

Fossilized partial skeleton of a flightless extinct seabird.

New plotopterid (extinct flightless relative of boobies and cormorants) Fucadytes discrepans: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Klallamornis abyssa is sunk into K. buchanani. 🪶🧪 (📷Mayr & Goedert)

Why it’s not a problem that dinosaurs are sold for millions of dollars – art historian A ceratosaurus fossil has sold for US$30 million in New York, infuriating many dinosaur experts. Here’s why they ought to think again.

We need more nuanced commentary on the sale of fossils than we often get, but this take is awful. Selling fossils is fine as museums can always buy casts and dinosaurs become more prominent because of sales is missing the point so badly the shot went backwards: theconversation.com/why-its-not-...

Huge, dark-brown, four-tusked mammal fossil sits mounted on brass pipes.

First #FossilFriday as curator of VP at University of Nebraska, so here's one of our stars:
'Tetrabelodon' osborni a very early gomohothere or "four-tusker" from Boyd Co. NE. Related to mammoths, but it has lower tusks so long they barely fit in the picture! ⚒️🧪

I had an absolute blast talking with David and Will about the wacky and wild world of shrews, have a listen!

Episode 222 – Shrews Listen to Episode 222 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts! They’re among the tiniest of mammals and they live some of the most extreme lifestyles. T…

This episode, @denoudenderek.bsky.social joins us to explain the extraordinary biology and evolution of shrews!

Colourful illustration of a forest scene in which a large, blue-grey vaguely salamander-like animal is running somewhat comically, it's maw open to grab a smaller, sail-backed animal that is escaping up a fallen tree trunk. The ground is covered by mosses, dead leaves and ferns, with several insects and millpedes around.

Clumsy Hunter

In the early Permian, a little less than 300 million years ago, life on land had long been rich and diverse, but most of the animals were still a bit... goofy.

Here's Eryops chasing down a Platyhystrix in a lush riverside forest in what is now Texas, some 290 million years ago.

Congrats!

Thrilled to share that starting in late August, I'll be Natural History Museum Specialist for the History Museum at the Castle in Appleton, WI! I'll be overseeing the exhibition and programming of the nat. his. collection, which is being moved from the old Weis Earth Science Museum.

A closeup photo looking down at the top of a lizard's head. The lizard has spiny scales on the neck and body, in a high-contrast pattern of dark brown/black and white/bluish-cream. Visible in the center smooth scale atop the head is an oval dot called the parietal eye, a third eye not for image-forming but used to sense day-night cycles.

An extreme closeup photo looking down at the top of a lizard's head (a crop of the other photo in this post). In the center smooth scale is an oval dot, amber colored with a central spot; this is the parietal eye, a third eye not for image-forming but used to sense day-night cycles.

Yarrow's Spiny Lizard (Sceleporus jarrovii), Arizona. See the parietal eye? This third eye has a lens, cornea, & retina, but is not for image-forming. It senses light/dark to help regulate circadian rhythms, and may help the lizard avoid predators & assist with sense of direction. 🦎 #reptiles 👁️👁️👁️

This paper is so interesting! And has a great reconstruction of what the integument on titanosaur hands and feet might have looked like!

Remarkable soft tissue anatomy recorded in titanosaur (Sauropoda) tracks from the latest Cretaceous of Mongolia Abstract. Dinosaur footprints can provide important palaeobiological information, including the speed, behaviour, limb kinematics, and soft tissue anatomy

Remarkable soft tissue anatomy recorded in titanosaur (Sauropoda) tracks from the latest Cretaceous of Mongolia url: academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/a...

Watch the seismic waves from today's magnitude 7.3 Alaska earthquake ripple across seismic stations in North America.

More ➡️ loom.ly/kaJp5I0

👀

These are not bony but cartilaginous in nature and get the new name, chondroderms. These tiny spikes, embedded in the skin, supported a serrated trailing edge that stretched over nearly the full length of the flipper. As closer inspection revealed that these weren't just...

A little display with a 10x scale caecilian skull model, which is mostly teeth by volume. Behind it is a photo that looks suspiciously like a drooling chestburster

So it turns out caecilians are the worst animals

Bones, jaws and teeth of cave hyaena from Kirkdale Cave, Yorkshire.

#FossilFriday: cave hyaena fossils from Kirkdale Cavern, Yorkshire, used by William Buckland in his 1822 study of cave faunas, Reliquiae Diluvianae, and currently on display @morethanadodo.bsky.social's Breaking Ground exhibition.

Sonnerat's shrew - Wikipedia

So Sonnerat's shrew might just be a color mutant?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnera...