NSF EAR Postdoctoral Fellow at the Field Museum of Natural History. Tetrapods in deep time: evolution, development, and paleontology. Also: mountains.
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Time to update those Eukaryote Origins slides
And time to update those Origin of Multicellularity slides while I'm at it
Since we're talking about bizarre fish reproductive puzzles, here's one. Modern coelacanths give live birth after years of gestation and therefore must have internal fertilization. But male coelacanths lack any sort of structure to deliver the sperm to the ovum...no intromittent organ of any kind.
New (fragmentary) fossils extend the record of salamandrids (newts and allies) into the Cretaceous of Europe. Not a shocker given their close relatives also have Cretaceous records, but good to see, regardless.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Definitive soft tissue evidence for Cambrian bryozoans. We can all confidently delete that "Bryozoans are the only phylum that arose after the Cambrian explosion" slide from our zoology/palaeontology slidedecks.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
You can't really go wrong with Shirley Jackson either
Led by the incomparable Sanaa El-Sayed, a study out today in Science Advances throws open an important new window on marine fish diversity during the critical few million years following the K-Pg mass extinction. Below: artistic vision of the new fauna by Ian Baylatry.
It's always been assumed that the evolution of multicellularity must have been clonal. Aggregative multicellularity in the filasteran protist Ministeria - a close relative of animals - offers an alternative perspective. Paper in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Eukaryogenesis was about more than a proteobacterium hitching a lift with an archaeon. Genes from other kinds of bacteria came along for the ride, stitched together with viruses. Paper in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Thursday is collections day, so here's a lungfish burrow from the Permian of Texas, featuring its inhabitant in cross-section (UMMP VP 61142).
Exquisite early Cambrian fossils of Protomelission gatehousei and Dayingomelission hexaclitia preserve soft-tissue anatomy and skeletal microstructure, confirming that these taxa are definitively...
