NSF GRFP awards just announced: www.research.gov/grfp/Awardee....
Nice to see that the overall numbers are back up, but only one award in paleontology (7 honorable mentions). No awards, one honorable mention for sedimentary geology.
Was approached by "Example 2." Then the alarm bells went off.
Be aware. lits.mtholyoke.edu/news/2026-03...
Song, et al. 2026. High-fidelity modular skeletons authenticate a Cambrian origin for Bryozoa. Nature.
Wang, Z., and T. Shi. 2026. Trace fossils constrain the perceptual ranges of the earliest motile animals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123(23):e2609730123.
Made this graph of the high temperature in Chicago over the last 50 days. Mean is 57.3 and the s.d. was 15.4. Not sure how this compares to the usual this time of year, but it the swings feel more extreme than usual.
Howard, R. J., R. J. Garwood, G. D. Edgecombe, and D. A. Legg. 2026. A revision of Praearcturus gigas: a giant scorpion from the Lower Devonian (Lochkovian) of Britain. Palaeontology 69(3):e70064.
The last few weeks have seen a series of new papers (none on dinosaurs!) that demonstrate the continued intellectual vitality of paleontology:
McCoy, et al. 2026. Stepwise loss of complexity in hagfish eyes prior to deep sea colonization. Biology Letters 22(5).
Genuine rewrite the textbooks discovery! 🧪🦑
The same team led last year's discovery of even deeper chemosynthetic animal communities. And they are in a crewed submersible, so they actually SAW THE WHALE GRAVEYARD!!! Can't wait for them to keep exploring!
Truly end of an era. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...