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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 20h

Australia is fundamentally biogeographically-macroevolutionarily perturbed system. Many native species will go extinct, invasive species will stay -- you won't unscramble what is already mixed, and after some time a new species will emerge which will form a new equilibrium in a new context.
🧪 ⚒️

Grant Hamilton 🐨 @ecologygrant.bsky.social · 2d

The shrew’s extinction increases the tally of Australian mammals extinct since 1788 to 39 species. This is far more than for any other country. These losses represent about 10% of all Australia’s land mammal species before colonisation 🧪

theconversation.com/and-then-the...

And then there were none: Australia’s only shrew declared extinct

Australia’s only known shrew has been declared extinct. Its loss emphasises the need for national protection of Australia’s rare and unique wildlife.

theconversation.com

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Reposted by Andrej Spiridonov

Armin Reindl @arminreindl.bsky.social · 1d

For #Croctober Day 11 we got Confractosuchus (art by Julius Csotonyi)
Confracto once inhabited the Winton Formation of Australia, but unlike the tiny Isisfordia was sizable enough to even feed on dinosaurs. Which we know because we found the bones of an elasmarian in its stomach

$Paleoart and a 3D scan of Confractosuchus. On top the animal (drawn by Julius Csotonyi) is shown lunging out of the water in a wooded region, a small elasmarian ornithopod in the process of being swallowed. The graphic below it shows a 3D scan of the fossil material, the skull largely resembles modern crocodiles.$

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 1d

"We estimated that approximately half
of speciation events are accompanied by accelerated phenotypic change. Equivalent in magnitude to approximately 7 million years of gradual
microevolution"

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 1d

A very interesting and clever study which explores how change is distributed between anagenesis and cladogenesis (gradual vs punctuational change) in the light of brain-body size allometry in modern primates.
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Macroecology
academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...

Posterior distributions of estimated rates of brain and body mass coevolution.

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 2d

"...regional extinction rate of between 75 and 84% for squamates in the Western Interior of North America and suggests this group was more severely impacted across the K/Pg boundary than other small-bodied vertebrates."
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology

Diversity of North American squamates across the K/Pg boundary.

Late Cretaceous squamates from DMNH Loc.3648 (a–aa) and early Palaeocene squamates from DMNH Loc.2560 (bb–dd).

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 2d

Cool, McArthur genius award goes to the Lithuanian expat Ieva Jusionytė. She studies "entanglements between the contemporary state and various modes of violence and wounding."
www.lrt.lt/lituanica/ak...

JAV gyvenanti antropologė Jusionytė pelnė prestižinę 800 tūkst. dolerių stipendiją

JAV gyvenanti Brauno universiteto antropologė Ieva Jusionytė apdovanota 800 tūkst. dolerių MacArthuro stipendija (angl. ...

www.lrt.lt

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Reposted by Andrej Spiridonov

J Pardo @jdpardo.bsky.social · Sep 5

Interesting use of lithium isotopes to test for habitat specialization in Miguasha vertebrates. Notably, the authors find evidence for marine occupancy for tetrapodamorphs Eusthenopteron and Elpistostege, compared to freshwater occupancy in other common taxa.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 2d

Interesting study by Norbert and co about the determination of coherent spatio-temporal structures ("atmospheric rivers") in ephemeral realm of the atmosphere.
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....
🧪 ⚒️ #Complexity #Atmosphere

Example output of the AR identification algorithm, showing contours and axes of AR shapes

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Reposted by Andrej Spiridonov

Sergi Valverde @svalver.bsky.social · 3d

The Innovation Game: How Arcade Genres Evolve, Imitate, and Collapse
www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20... @blaividiella.bsky.social @andrejpaleo.bsky.social

The Innovation Game: How Arcade Genres Evolve, Imitate, and Collapse « News# « Cambridge Core Blog

What can Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Mortal Kombat teach us about cultural evolution? In shopping malls of the 1970s, arcades were where people played digital games together, huddled around custom-bu...

www.cambridge.org

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 3d

Great to see Sergi's blog post about the recent study on the macroevolutionary dynamics of arcade games.
doi.org/10.1017/ehs....
🧪 ⚒️ #Complexity #EvoBio

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 4d

Extinct Pleistocene carnivores were diurnal and had high metabolic rates:
"Only basal metabolic rate and diurnality are robust predictors of extinction, even after accounting for phylogenetic and trait uncertainty"
nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #Macroecology

Results of logistic regression analyses associating traits with extinction outcomes.

Violin plots comparing the basal metabolic rate and threat status of living species.

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Reposted by Andrej Spiridonov

Royal Society Publishing @royalsocietypublishing.org · 10d

New in #PhilTransB - a theme issue exploring one of science’s deepest questions: how life can emerge from non-living matter. Edited by @ricardsole.bsky.social and colleagues. Read: buff.ly/7iz4tGu

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 6d

Interesting: "Warming altered abundance scaling with size depending on richness; in high-richness communities, temperature favored small protists, steepening the CCSR slope"

On Ka scales there were systemic shifts in size-abundance distribution during extinction event
www.geology.cz/bulletin/ful...

Histograms of the cyst diameters of Leiosphaeridia spp. in the mid-to-upper Homerian from the Viduklë-61 well. The histograms show the raw morphometric data on the taxon from the studied interval shown by graptolite zones. The graptolite zones are based on Radzevičius et al. (2014b).

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 6d

Human cities are essentially integrated human (almost)super-organismal colonies. Therefore, urbanistics, among other things, studies the astogeny of humans (as integrated functional spatial collectives) at larger — geographical — scales.
arxiv.org/abs/2510.03045
🧪 #Complexity #Geography

Morphologies obtained from Batty et al's model

Simulated urban growth patterns constrained by different transport networks.

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 7d

Interesting study analyzing paleobiogeographical patterns of the P-Tr extinction and recovery
"ammonoid biogeography was primarily dispersal-constrained during the Griesbachian and Spathian, and niche-constrained during the Smithian"
www.scup.com/doi/full/10....
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Macroecology

Palaeo-location of the 27 regions of A) conodont and B) ammonoid taxa

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 9d

The major update on the origins of a major group of fishes based on new fossils:
"Notably, ancestral range and habitat reconstructions indicate marine origins for the otophysan crown groups, with at least two transitions to freshwater"
www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology

Maximum a posteriori tree of otophysans resulting from a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis mapped with ancestral geographic range and habitat environment reconstruction.

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 10d

Impressive coverage of the ghost-range in leech tree, between the relatives which are found in 200 million year younger (Mesozoic) rocks. I would guess, as many major animal innovations, the true divergence should have been in the mid- Ordovician.
peerj.com/articles/199...
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio

Phylogenetic analyses recover Macromyzon as a stem leech

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 11d

Interesting review article concentrating on some proximal causes of mass extinctions, namely the environmental toxicity of heavy metals.

www.nature.com/articles/s43...
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology

Proposed cause-and-effect relationships of bolide impacts , LIPs, and anthropogenic activity with heavy metal toxicity

Differences in the physiological effects between bioessential and non
bioessential heavy metals in terrestrial sporomorphs and benthic foraminifera

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 11d

Congratulations Peter with this great synthesis! I've liked the concept of the "Earth System Engineers" -- this whole discussion on the ecosystem engineering was rather restricted in scale, and now it seems, more appropriate concepts and their connections are put forward.

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 11d

To elaborate the point, I believe there should be a 'spectrum of individuality" of species across the tree of life.

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 11d

Yes sure, as well as diffusion of molecules with external environment makes us (as organisms) 'approximate' -- fuzzy individuals.

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 11d

Anagenesis presumes that the splitting is superfluous for the pronounced change. And the overwhelming evidence suggests that the cladogenesis is the main cause of change in all kinds of evolutionary systems (including species).

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 11d

Study is exploring what paleontologists and neontologists know about the punctuated equilibria, and how they perceive the dominant modes of evolution. As expected, there is a significant variance in views on evolution reflecting differing backgrounds.
doi.org/10.1017/pab....
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio

Opinions of evolutionists on the prevalence of different modes of evolution.

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 11d

One more conceptual layer of the Bretskyan hierarchy: how organisms map on their range and environments or what is the geometry of their movement (as exemplified by dogs and cats).
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Macroecology
www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Ridge densities for canids and felids for the nine landscapes in which at least one species from each clade was tracked together.

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Andrej Spiridonov @andrejpaleo.bsky.social · 12d

Earth's strata — the result, the record and the cause of geodynamics, climate changes, and biodiversity structures on our planet.
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology

Zoltán Sylvester @zzsylvester.bsky.social · 13d

Last week I was co-leading a field trip in Utah, to check out some fluvial and eolian rocks. It was exhausting but fun and forced me to think more carefully than before about complex bedforms. This is a 3D model of one of the many stunning exposures of the Navajo Sandstone near Escalante 🧪⚒️

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