Angela Collier is fantastic, and this is possibly my favorite of her videos. Highly recommend a watch for a fascinating story about the discovery in insulin and who gets the credit.

I spent so much time in this exhibit as a kid! I have distinct memories of the yellow herrerosaurs, the frequently origins of life puppet show, and the ramp behind the apatosaurus. Also a horse evolution puppet show I think? What a blast from the past. Thanks for sharing!

Curious whether anyone knows if authors of scientific papers are members of this Class, or whether we signed that away to the publishers? Regardless, it's interesting to see which of my papers were used.

Thanks for the shoutout! Doing this on live primates is tough. We've been discussing whether we can do more but for now we're focusing on cadavers, with some surprising results so far.

First official postdoc paper out in @jexpbiol.bsky.social! We compare different approaches to studying kinematics in a macaque ankle and note that the talocrural joint seems to contribute minimally to dorsiflexion of the foot during stance phase. journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Very cool! I'm confused as to why we see spikes in use of cold climates during periods of global warming (PETM & Mid Miocene) when they were presumably rarer. Does this indicate an inverse relationship between use and availability of cold climates or am I misinterpreting what climate categories are?

Buried in the regime's political takeover letter of the Smithsonian is the worst bit. Unlike exhibits, which are non-destructive towards primary materials, temporary in nature, and reversible, the foundational collections are irreplacable. They want to be able to throw stuff out.

I am no constitutional scholar, but I can't help but feel that "the President gets to dictate what every university can teach and what every television station should broadcast" is closer to what the founding fathers were worried about when it comes to free speech than trigger warnings on syllabi.

One of the marvelous things about the United States - something it shares with Rome, I might add - is that American identity is fundamentally legal in definition and almost totally binary.

Regardless of my politics or his, Zohran Mamdani, naturalized in 2018, is every bit as much an American as me.

Using ancestral state reconstructions to generate hypotheses about primate evolution and testing them against the fossil record. urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=htt...
This has been in the works a long time and I'm really pleased to finally have it out! Thanks to all who contributed.

Musing: one side effect of constantly defending (eg an institution or a political party) against disinformation and bad faith criticism is that you can become habituated to ignoring all criticism (as bad faith), which makes it difficult to learn, adapt, grow, and address your actual weaknesses.

Population wide supplementation as a public health intervention is not new and has yielded incredible health benefits through the years don't let the misguided attacks on fluoridated water fool you.
Why do you think iodide is added to table salt? Since we are intent of forgetting history here is a 🧵

“And I’m like, what do you mean, you ‘do your own research’? You running a double-blind study in your living room, dawg?”
- A guy walking ahead of me with his friends on a NYC sidewalk in 2021, also my favorite overheard dialogue of the entire pandemic

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

TLDR: the administration wants to remove habitat loss from the definition of "harm" for endangered species, which will effectively gut the ESA.

I just commented. If you're in any way interested in ecology, nature, and the protection of endangered species, you should, too. Free daily action!

New paper on evolvability in apes, and whether it can help us make sense of the messy evolution of locomotion in that group. My results suggest a feedback effect between integration and the response to selection. We need more research on how integration evolves! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

We do know it struggles on Windows computers without administrator privileges, but other than that while it's bare bones it's working as intended as far as we know. So curious to send it out into the world and see what people think!

I can't really say it's under 'active development', but if you find bugs or have feature suggestions, let me know and we'll add them to our list!

A tool to quickly match taxon names between a dataset and a phylogenetic tree, built for folks doing phylogenetic comparative analyses: github.com/spearw/phylo...

But operationalizing this for species is a headache, to put it mildly. And it is borderline impossible to think about species in the fossil record as anything other than fuzzy sets of morphological variation (i.e., to give them morphological definitions).

This approach is easier to take with higher taxa when we can mostly assume there is no gene flow between groups. In this case we can simply 'define' a it as 'the last common ancestor of X and Y and all of its descendants' or 'all species more closely related to A than to B'.

If taxa are 'defined' by morphology, etc., then individuals can cease to be a member of that taxon, which is nonsense from a phylogenetic perspective. Snakes are still tetrapods, even if they no longer have four limbs, because four limbs is a tool to diagnose tetrapods, not the way we define them.

It's worth mentioning the distinction between definition and diagnosis of biological taxa: Taxa must be *defined* by their ancestry, but can be diagnosed (i.e., recognized) with specific characteristics and morphology. See Rowe (1987) for a concise review: www.jstor.org/stable/24132...