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Proud advisor moment: my graduate student Kiera Crowley received the Gary Lane Award from the Paleontological Society! It feels particular special since Gary Lane was my PhD advisor's advisor. Huge congrats to Kiera & many thanks to the The Paleontological Society for supporting students!

The deadline (April 30th) is approaching for the AWG Undergrad Excellence in Paleo and Winifred Goldring Awards! Please share wide and far! Both awards are open to applicants (undergrad, MS, PhD) across the globe 🌍🌎🌏 Info & to apply: awg.org/page/Scholarsh…

Congratulations to Kiera Crowley (Wright lab) for receiving this year's Outstanding Graduate Teaching Associate Award from OU Geosciences!

Meet Oklahomacystis tribrachiatus (OU 221250), a weird & wonderful fossil echinoderm! This species belongs to the Paracrinoidea, an extinct lineage of rare & unusual blastozoan echinoderms. Despite their name they aren't likely to be very closely related to crinoids #FossilFriday

Nice review of the FBD model and its application using fossil data: cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Here's a lovely stop motion video about the wonders of crinoid echinoderms (sea lilies & feather stars) and their fossil record youtube.com/watch?v=YboRhO…

New from RGGS Comp Bio PhD Alum Mark Nikolic and colleagues: From fossils to phylogenies: exploring the integration of paleontological data into Bayesian phylogenetic inference Paleobiology 51(1): 214-236 DOI: doi.org/10.1017/pab.20… in a new window] cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Fascinating diagram showing hypothesized dynamics of speciation, extinction, and geographic migration for Cambrian biomere events. Figure from J. Stitt's 1977 monograph on Cambrian-Ordovician trilobites from the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma

Very excited to give my final lecture of my History of the Earth & Life class for non-majors about "The Myth of Progress" where we discuss bias in the iconography of life's history (i.e., paleoart) + summarize big picture takeaways about the meaning of fossils & future of life

25 years ago Stephen Jay Gould (right) was the keynote speaker during the opening of Sam Noble Museum, stating "the museum is fabulous. You should all be proud for pulling off such a stunning success against such great odds!" On the left is Emeritus Director Michael Mares

Me, explaining contingency: "Ask yourself: if animals like Pikaia were pruned from the tree of life at the close of the Cambrian, or if a giant rock from space hadn't colided w/ Earth & led to a mass extinction 66 mya, would Sabrina Carpenter have songs on top 40 radio in 2025?"

Happy to share my new article on how morphological diversification proceeds during evolutionary radiations: "The diffused evolutionary dynamics of morphological novelty" pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… 🧵1/12

Although fossils from nearly all major intervals of the Phanerozoic can be found in Oklahoma, it's a veritable Paleozoic paradise at the Sam Noble Museum #FossilFriday

If you support investment in the National Science Foundation and other federal funding agencies, please don't forget to advocate for the Institute of Museum and Library Services!

The question of how to distinguish species boundaries from intraspecific geographic variation is now more of an issue than ever in the genomic age. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

"The crust of the Earth is a vast museum." - Charles Darwin #TrilobiteTuesday

"Generative AI, including ChatGPT, is the worst idea in the long, sad history of dumb ideas." -- Ian Malcolm, probably

"...simulation studies demonstrate that empirical expertise is key to obtaining reliable results when using FBD models. It is therefore crucial that fundamental stratigraphic and taxonomic research remain well supported" 👏👏👏 cambridge.org/core/journals/…

A perfect system for funding scientific research may not exist but we'll miss it when it's gone

Congratulations to OU Paleobiology graduate students Kiera Crowley (Wright lab) and Nicolas Bell (Cole lab) for successfully defending their graduate research proposals to their committees this week! Well done!