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Reposted by Christopher Dean

The Palaeoverse Community @palaeoverse.bsky.social · Jul 28

Yesterday we led a workshop at @cpeg-cpb25.bsky.social on “Building open data science skills in paleobiology and ecology”. Huge thanks to everyone involved for making the workshop so successful and fun! 🤩

William Gearty presents some advanced topics when using GitHub

Lewis Jones discusses different approaches for dealing with missing data

Harriet Drage feeds back suggestions from the group, written on post-its, on the opportunities and difficulties of archiving data and code

A group picture of the workshop leaders and participants in front of a fresco at the University of Zurich

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Harriet B. Drage @harriedrage.bsky.social · Jun 6

This week, Open Palaeontology published our first research article: a reassessment of the giant millipede-like Arthropleura by Lhéritier, Vallois and Durand! Thank you to the authors for being part of the open-access publishing revolution!
www.openpalaeo.org/article/view...

Re-assessment of Arthropleura from the Moscovian of Northern France: new anatomical information and adaptations to terrestrial environments | Open Palaeontology

www.openpalaeo.org

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The Palaeoverse Community @palaeoverse.bsky.social · Jun 4

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨

It’s time to announce our Summer 2025 talk schedule 👀
Looking forward to hearing from @spissatella.bsky.social, @sauropodlets.bsky.social, @nmkphylo.bsky.social and @russellgarwood.co.uk!

Sign up here: bit.ly/palaeoverse-lecture-series-2025

A flyer for the Palaeoverse Lecture Series for Summer 2025
June 26th - Dr Katie Collins, Natural History Museum
“Both round and upward: Spiral morphometry and how to compare things that are the same, but different”
July 31st - Summer break
August 28th - Amy Shipley, University of Leeds
“Modelling ancient food webs: ecosystem changes across the Pliocene marine megafaunal extinction”
September 25th - Dr Nicolás Mongiardino Koch, UC San Diego and Dr Russell Garwood, University of Manchester
“The Tree of Life and Death: What do fossil taxa contribute to morphological phylogenetics?”

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Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · May 30

Really happy to see this out! Also super grateful for Jeff bringing me on board; what started as a casual conversation over lunch in the NHM staff room has turned into some really interesting work and a great friendship. What more can you ask for?!

Read on for stuff on fossil record preservation! ⤵️

Jeff Thompson @echinerd.bsky.social · May 30

Super happy to see this out! Ever wondered what regulates taphonomic quality in skeletal fossil records? New with @princessquatris.bsky.social , Tim Ewin, and Maddy Ford we identify the controls on preservational quality in Palaeozoic echinoids onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Taphonomic controls on a multi‐element marine skeletal fossil record

Animals with multi-element skeletons, including the vertebrates, echinoderms and arthropods, are some of the most biodiverse and ecologically important animal groups. Understanding the relative impac...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · May 28

Go work with Lewis, he's bloody great.

But seriously, if you're interested in bias in the fossil record, open science, or corals, he's your man!

Lewis A. Jones (he/him) @lewisajones.bsky.social · May 27

Interested in applying for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship this year? Feel free to reach out!

We've got micro🔬, invert 🪸, and vert palaeo🦕 @es-ucl.bsky.social!

📆 We are accepting Expressions of Interest until 9th June!

marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/actions/post...

Postdoctoral Fellowships

The information provided on this page is a summary of the main rules and requirements for Postdoctoral Fellowships (PFs) and who can apply for them.

marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu

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Jeff Thompson @echinerd.bsky.social · May 22

Just under two weeks left to apply for this 3 year postdoc looking at how signalling shapes skeletal development in sea urchins! Please reach out if you’re interested! For lovers of imaging, skeletal development, biomineralization, in situ hybridization, and marine invertebrates!

Jeff Thompson @echinerd.bsky.social · May 12

Interested in Developmental biology? Imaging? Marine invertebrate body plans? Then this three year postdoc in my group @sotonbiosciences.bsky.social is for you! Join our team to decypher how signalling molecules shape skeletal phenotype in juvenile sea urchins. jobs.soton.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

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Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · May 22

A huge thanks to @bethanyjallen.bsky.social for the write up on our recent Current Biology paper! Happy to have added to the ever growing toolkit for combatting sampling bias in deep time 🖥️📈🦕

Dr. Bethany Allen @bethanyjallen.bsky.social · May 21

I wrote a Dispatch for Current Biology on the neat new paper by @princessquatris.bsky.social et al., highlighting why occupancy modelling is an exciting tool for understanding sampling bias in palaeontology 🦕
You can access it for free using this link:
authors.elsevier.com/a/1l7HM3QW8S...

authors.elsevier.com

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Dr. Bethany Allen @bethanyjallen.bsky.social · May 6

If you are interested in biodiversity in deep time, check out my new preprint with @rachelwarnock.bsky.social and @dralexdunhill.bsky.social! We review methods of quantifying diversity and diversification, using the fossil record and phylogenies with extinct tips 🐚🦕📊
doi.org/10.32942/X2D...

“A history of the world imperfectly kept”: Will we ever know how biodiversity has changed over deep time?

doi.org

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Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · Apr 23

🖥️ Our new paper summarising the paleontological community's progress with data equity is now out! 📉

Really thankful to have played a small part in the making of this paper; it was a joy working with these folks and very satisfying to find a home for some of my thoughts on museum data and curation.

Emma Dunne @emmadnn.bsky.social · Apr 23

Delighted to share our paper on data equity in #palaeobiology as part of Paleobiology's 50th anniversary issue 🥳

We look at how palaeo data is collected, stored, curated & shared, and how equity in these processes is crucial for our field's future (1/n) 🧪⚒️

doi.org/10.1017/pab....

Simplified flowchart illustrating generalised steps in palaeobiological research processes and the various factors that introduce inequity with regard to data collection, storage, study, analysis, publication, and reuse.

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Andrew Alden @geology.bsky.social · Apr 22

The paperback is here!

The author holds his shelf copy of Deep Oakland's new softcover edition, release date 6 May, preorder now!

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Tara Okon @rivers-disguise.bsky.social · Apr 21

Curlews #WorldCurlewDay

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Megan Renoir @meganrenoir.bsky.social · Apr 14

I use the CDNC *literally* daily for research that supports tribal sovereignty/rights claims.

This is such a vital resource with outsized impact for U.S. researchers, communities, history, etc etc etc.

Please, please, pleaseeee reshare and submit a comment!

Jim Casey @jimccasey1.bsky.social · Apr 14

🚨 Funding is being cut for the California Digital Newspaper Collection!

The state budget for next year zeroes out all funding, which would put the entire site offline permanently.

Please fill out comments
- sbud.senate.ca.gov/members/subc...

- abgt.assembly.ca.gov/sub-committe...

Sample text ⬇️

I write to urge you to put the $430,000 for the California Newspaper Project (CNP) back into the FY2026 budget. For more than three decades, the CNP has worked to catalog, preserve and digitize our state’s newspapers. Along with tens of thousands of other Californians, I am an avid user of their California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC), https://cdnc.ucr.edu, a free online collection of more than 40 million pages of digitized newspapers from around the Golden State. Every year they digitize millions of additional pages through grants, partnerships with private industry, and contracts with institutions around the state. No one else in California does this work and without the state support for the CNP, no one will do it. The CDNC is the largest archive of its kind in the country. This relatively small investment from the State will ensure this unique and invaluable resource remains freely accessible to all Californians.

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UK Reproducibility Network @ukrepro.bsky.social · Apr 10

Great to see Lewis Jones received his Doscar as one of the winners of the 2025 Dorothy Bishop Prize for his work on the Paleoverse (palaeoverse.org) a community space improving reproducibility in palaeobiological research.

#Palaeobiology #Reproducibility #OpenResearch #Research

A lego minifigure of Dorothy Bishop with a laptop, which is a 'Doscar' award for the UKRN Dorothy Bishop Prize, held in an open hand, in front of a laptop screen with visible text "Welcome to the Paleoverse"

Lewis Jones, a smiling brown haired man, holding the lego minifigure of Dorothy Bishop (the 'Doscar' award for UKRN Dorothy Bishop Prize) out in front of him.

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Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · Apr 9

Thanks so much Alexej! And thanks for all your help on the course; the paper wouldn’t have been possible without it!

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Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · Apr 9

🦖📉 In case anyone missed it, our new paper on using occupancy modelling to resolve the structure of the end-Cretaceous dinosaur fossil record came out yesterday! 🪨⛰️

You can find it here ⬇️

www.cell.com/current-biol...

It's also accompanied by this incredible illustration by @tim-bird.bsky.social!

A comic representation of the author's paper published in Current Biology. It features the last days of the dinosaurs, as well as an graphic interpretation of the process of occupancy modelling and the results of the study.

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Reposted by Christopher Dean

New Scientist @newscientist.com · Apr 8

It’s been hotly debated whether dinosaur populations were thriving or dwindling when an asteroid slammed into the planet 66 million years ago.

Rethink of fossils hints dinosaurs still thrived before asteroid hit

The number of dinosaurs may have been stable before the asteroid impact, despite evidence that species were getting less diverse

www.newscientist.com

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Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · Apr 8

That phrasing is absolutely perfect. I hope you enjoyed the paper!

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Reposted by Christopher Dean

Andrew Alden @geology.bsky.social · Apr 8

A new way to gauge the cracks and stains in our windows to the deep past.

Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · Apr 8

🚨 I'm super happy to announce that our new paper is finally out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social! 🚨

We used the ecological approach of occupancy modelling to investigate the structure of the dinosaur fossil record prior to the K/Pg mass extinction!

www.cell.com/current-biol...

The structure of the end-Cretaceous dinosaur fossil record in North America

Dean et al. examine the fossil record of North American dinosaurs prior to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Estimates of detection probability from occupancy models decrease prior to the extinction...

www.cell.com

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Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · Apr 8

Ahhhh I realised I’m an idiot and @sineadlyster.bsky.social is on here!

Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · Apr 8

I'd also like to say a huge thanks to @tim-bird.bsky.social for producing a stunning piece of art to accompany the research. I've been a fan of Tim's graphic novels for many years now, so it was amazing to collaborate with him on this illustration! I love it so much.

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Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · Apr 8

I'd like to extend an enormous thanks to my coauthors: @macroecoevoale.bsky.social, Jeff Doser, Alex Farnsworth, @lewisajones.bsky.social, Sinéad Lyster, @charlieouthwaite.bsky.social, Paul Valdes, @richardjbutler.bsky.social and @pdmannion.bsky.social. I'm so lucky to get to work with these folks.

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Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · Apr 8

We also found that this appears to be unrelated to sampling intensity, i.e. how many dinosaur collections there are during the latest Cretaceous. This suggests that physical changes in environment and preservation are exerting a strong control on the terminal dinosaur fossil record!

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Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · Apr 8

📉 We found that the probability of detecting various dinosaur families decreases as we approach the K/Pg boundary, indicating that spatial and geological biases likely exert the largest control on their observable fossil record in North America 📉

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Christopher Dean @princessquatris.bsky.social · Apr 8

🚨 I'm super happy to announce that our new paper is finally out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social! 🚨

We used the ecological approach of occupancy modelling to investigate the structure of the dinosaur fossil record prior to the K/Pg mass extinction!

www.cell.com/current-biol...

The structure of the end-Cretaceous dinosaur fossil record in North America

Dean et al. examine the fossil record of North American dinosaurs prior to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Estimates of detection probability from occupancy models decrease prior to the extinction...

www.cell.com

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