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IZ's Cris Castello-Branco featured in a Guardian piece on sponges and the deep sea habitat that Christopher Mah, @echinoblog.bsky.social dubbed "The Forest of the Weird" theguardian.com/environment/20… “These kinds of environments with this diversity of sponges are more common than we used to think.”

#WormWednesday I’m excited to share that our paper on Deuterostome origins is now out in Biological Reviews; Camilla Souto Dr. Leptaena (Selina Cole) Dr. Davey F. Wright ⛏️🦕🧬 and I survey the fossil, developmental, and molecular evidence for early deuterostome evolution: tinyurl.com/3etzhppv 🧵👇

Looking for something to read as you wait in line to cast your vote? Look no further than our new paper in #PNAS exploring changing diversity in the Ediacara Biota! pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

In a particularly good week for me, our paper on the initial diversification of sea urchins, over 400 million years ago, is now available for free! Please check it out if you're interested in where and when #echinoids evolved. Or if you like the #Ordovician!

sepkoski 0.0.1 is now on CRAN📦! cran.r-project.org/web/packages/s… The package is provided to support teaching exercises and an example dataset for function documentation. Features include: - Access to Sepkoski's compendium🐚 - Plotting Sepkoski's curve 📈 #CRAN #rstats #palaeobiology

Incredible preservation of a congregation of Paleozoic sea urchins!

Camilla Souto yaiiii!! 🥳

Sea urchins are so 2010s, so I present to you the first phylogenomic study of sea cucumbers biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

These are Phoronids, a small group of marine invertebrates that belong to the phylum Lophophorata. They are often referred to as "horseshoe worms" due to the shape of their lophophores, which are ring-like structures that encircle the mouth and are used for filter feeding.

Excellent research opportunity for undergraduate students!

Love trumps hate. Feliz Brasil Novo! ❤️

Our paper integrating fossils, genes, & development to deuterostome evolution has been published in its final form for Biological Reviews! Check it out! Karma Nanglu Dr. Leptaena (Selina Cole) Camilla Souto dx.doi.org/10.1111/brv.12…

Studying reproduction in extinct organisms is challenging, and a fossil record of genitalia is very rare. Luckily the penis bone (baculum) of mammals fossilizes sometimes. I described this bone for an extinct subfamily of canids, the Borophaginae doi.org/10.1371/journa…

Wonderful talk by Cris Castello-Branco at Stockton University today on deep-sea sponge biodiversity and the importance of #taxonomy for #marineconservation. Thank you for enriching our lives with great science, Cris! #Porifera #DeepSea

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In our new nature paper, Darrin Schultz Darrin Schultz used the position of genes on chromosomes to show that ctenophores (comb jellies) not sponges are the sister-group to all other animals. nature.com/articles/s4158…

#Wormwednesday!

New paper by Phillip Davidson Great job, Phil! Global Invertebrate Genomics Alliance (GIGA) URI CELS Smithsonian NMNH Near-Chromosomal-Level Genome Assembly of the Sea Urchin Echinometra lucunter, a Model for Speciation in the Sea academic.oup.com/gbe/article/15…

How hard is it to do science in a language that’s not your first language? We quantified the severity of #languagebarriers for non-native English speakers when reading/publishing papers and attending/presenting at international conferences. doi.org/10.1371/journa… 1/9