Will Gearty

R version 4.5.3 "Reassured Reassurer" (source version) has been released. It should be on CRAN by now. #rstats

📢 New preprint out!

tl;dr: Publish your code, add clear README's!

138 participants assessed data & code archiving practices across 1861 papers published at 7 @britishecologicalsociety.org journals, identified gaps & offered recommendations for improvement

🔗 doi.org/10.32942/X26...

Comic. [Person with shoulder-length hair talking to a second person. She is gesturing at a dinosaur skeleton with a machine mounted on its back.] PERSON 1: Although Bazookasaurus’s distinctive structure was long assumed to be a weapon, vascularization studies show that it was very fragile and could only have been used for display.

Bazookasaurus

xkcd.com/3216/

Data- and code-archiving in the British Ecological Society journals: present status and recommendations for future improvements
doi.org/10.32942/X26...

📢 Including fossil tips in your phylogeny can double your continuous trait model fitting accuracy!

Updated preprint out now on @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social.

🔗 doi.org/10.32942/X27...

with @pedrolgodoy.bsky.social @macroecoevoale.bsky.social and @bethanyjallen.bsky.social

Comic. [Two people looking at a board with apparent formula (3.1.3.1)/(3.1.2.1)] PERSON: Do mammologists think these are hard? I mean, this one just evaluates to 3/2. [caption] Mathematicians encounter dental formulas

Dental Formulas

xkcd.com/3213/

🚨New preprint out @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social (under review elsewhere!) 🧵

No global collapse of food webs across the Permian–Triassic Mass Extinction (PTME)

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New Research Article published in OPal 🔬

Tip dating supports a Middle Ordovician origin for total-group chondrichthyans and a rapid radiation of acanthodian-grade taxa

By Lorenzo Emanuele Morra 

www.openpalaeo.org/article/view...

The billion-dollar case for sustaining palaeontology’s digital databases - Nature Ecology & Evolution The authors survey community palaeontological databases, documenting their contributions to science as well as their vulnerabilities, and provide recommendations for the future of open science databas...

🚨 Hot off the press: Our look into of the palaeontological database landscape and its sustainability into the future.

Palaeo databases are invaluable and continue to transform our research field - but they are vulnerable... (1/6) 🧪 ⛏️

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A flyer for the next instalment of the Palaeoverse Lecture Series. The flyer features a cartoon laptop with a sticker of the Palaeoverse logo on the lid, alongside a picture of Natalie, wearing glasses and a white and green shirt.

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨
🗓️26th February 2026, 15:00 UTC🗓️

Join us next week for our next instalment, given by Dr Natalie Cooper @nhcooper123.bsky.social from Natural History Museum, London, on “Hack-a-thons: what, why and how to run them” 💻

Register here: bit.ly/palaeoverse-...

📣 The useR! 2026 committee invites global R users and developers to submit abstracts for talks, panels, posters, and tutorials!

Submissions are peer-reviewed based on content and balance.

You're welcome to apply!
Find more at:
user2026.r-project.org/call/

#useR2026 #DataScience #Poland #Warsaw

A flyer describing the next four talks in the Palaeoverse Lecture Series, which take place on the last Thursday of every month at 3pm UTC. February 26th: Dr Natalie Cooper, Natural History Museum, London Hack-a-thons: what, why and how to run them March 26th: Dr Brooke Long-Fox, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology Building open, reproducible palaeontology: a practical introduction to FAIR data and MorphoBank April 30th: Dr Joseph Flannery-Sutherland, University of Birmingham Cleaning taxonomy, time, and their messy interactions with the fossilbrush R package May 28th: Dr Alexandra Howard, Texas A&M University Using palaeontological, neontological, and spatial data to understand evolution through time and space

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨

We are very excited to share our next four talks in the Series 🥳

We are looking forward to hearing from @nhcooper123.bsky.social, @brooke-long-fox.bsky.social, Joseph Flannery-Sutherland and @alexh-palaeo.bsky.social!

Sign up now at bit.ly/palaeoverse-...

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

OpenAI ”acknowledged in its own research that LLMs will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering, marking a significant admission from one of the AI industry’s leading companies.”

You can’t trust chatbots.

[blog] Paleontology R Packages to Benefit from Software Sustainability Institute Grant 🎉 🦴

Palaeoverse is a grassroots organization that develops R packages for paleontology (The Palaeoverse toolkit). 🐊🦕🌿🪸🦑

Will Gearty and The Palaeoverse Team are excited to announce funding from the Software […]

dplyr 1.2.0 dplyr 1.2.0 fills in some important gaps in dplyr's API: we've added a new complement to `filter()` focused on dropping rows, and we've expanded the `case_when()` family with three new recoding and re...

dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited!

- `filter_out()` for dropping rows

- `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools

These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats!

tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...

Nominations for Student Representative to the Paleontological Society (2026-2028) The deadline for consideration is March 1, 2026. The Role: Student Representatives serve as voices for student needs in the Society and play leading roles in student activities including organizing...

⚡Applications for Paleontological Society Student Representative (2026-2028) are open! ⚡ @paleosoc.bsky.social

It's a great way to be a part of the community and advocate for students! Applications due March 1.

forms.gle/6qg2BLWgEXVd...

Great news! A new NSF Geoinformatics grant to support the PBDB was funded in June of 2025! This will overhaul the technical underpinnings of PBDB, a necessary step for carrying the PBDB forward -- www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

Winifred goldring award: apply by April 30th! Coral decorative image in background

Opportunity for women students in paleontology! The Winifred Goldring Award will be presented to three women graduate students and the AWG Undergraduate Paleontology Award will be presented to a student pursuing a career in paleontology. Due April 30th. More information here: tinyurl.com/msdc3m68

3-panel comic. (1) [Three small arthropods on ocean floor.] ARTHROPOD 1: Now that we’re multicellular, what are your plans? I’m gonna evolve little legs and swim around with them! ARTHROPOD 2: I’m gonna evolve sharp pincers and use them to crunch stuff! ARTHROPOD 3: I’m gonna evolve glands to make string from my butt and use it to construct elaborate geometric nets hundreds of times my size to catch other animals. (2) [Silence] (3) ARTHROPOD 1: *Dude.* ARTHROPOD 2: Can you *please* just be normal about this? ARTHROPOD 3: *What??!*

Early Arthropods

xkcd.com/3199/

A flyer advertising the next instalment of the Palaeoverse Lecture Series. The flyer features a cartoon of a sloping landscape, featuring a river and trees, overlying a grid system suggesting how it might be modelled. There is also a black and white picture of Dr De Groeve, with spiky hair and wearing a black t-shirt.

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨
🗓️29th January 2026, 15:00 UTC🗓️

Join us next week for our first lecture of 2026, given by Dr Johannes De Groeve from University of Amsterdam, on “Tips for TABS (Temporal Altitudinal Biogeographic Shifts)” 🏔️

Register here: bit.ly/palaeoverse-...

Americans Are the Ones Paying for Tariffs, Study Finds New research contradicts President Trump’s claim that foreigners are footing the bill.

“Foreign exporters absorbed only 4% of last year’s U.S. tariff increases by lowering prices, while American consumers and importers absorbed 96%.

“Rather than acting as a tax on foreign producers, the tariffs functioned as a consumption tax on Americans.”

www.wsj.com/economy/trad...

Postdoctoral Researcher, Paleontology San Francisco, CA

Collaborate with me! Myself and @peterroopnarine.bsky.social are looking for a postdoc with expertise in quantitative paleoecology to work on our new NSF grant addressing whether communities after the PTME functioned differently than those beforehand.

job-boards.greenhouse.io/californiaac...

4-panel comic. (1) PERSON 1 with ponytail: The inspection revealed a few problems. Looks like your planet needs an alignment. PERSON 2: Oh? (2) PERSON 1: Yeah, your magnetic axis is 400 miles off-center from your rotational one. PERSON 2: Is that bad? (3) PERSON 1: The unbalanced magnetic field could cause radiation anomalies over the South Atlantic. Have you noticed any spacecraft equipment failures in that area? PERSON 2: There *have* been a few, actually. (4) PERSON 1: We can give you a loaner planet while yours is in the shop. Is a gas giant OK? PERSON 2: I’d *really* prefer a solid surface. PERSON 1: Sorry, it’s all we have. But it’ll just be for a few days.

Planetary Alignment

xkcd.com/3192/

Comic. [Two adults, one with short light hair, walking with a child with spiky hair.] PERSON: Oops, I forgot to say “rabbit rabbit” on January first! CHILD: Why do you do that? PERSON: Just a superstition. CHILD: What’s a superstition? PERSON: It’s a way to train yourself to feel like any bad thing that happens is your fault.

Superstition

xkcd.com/3191/

These roles are now live! 🚨

Come join the @palaeoverse.bsky.social team at @es-ucl.bsky.social.

Research Software Engineer: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Community Engagement Coordinator: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Closing date: 18-Jan-2026

Introducing blockr: Data Apps Without Code - cynkra In this blog post we celebrate the first stable release of blockr, a tool to build data apps in minutes, using a point and click user interface. See what is included in this first release and learn ho...

A first version of #rstats blockr is now on CRAN! 🎉

Build interactive data workflows and dashboards without any code!

cynkra.com/blog/2025-12...

Grad students! Three more weeks to submit your Paleobiology Summer School application. Don’t forget!
We need your application & the letter of support by your supervisor. Questions or do you need assistance? Get in contact and we are happy to help.
More info: www.paleosynthesis.nat.fau.de/apw-apply/

After last year's successful refresh of the BES Reproducible Code guide (www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/...), this year we're going to refresh the Data Management guide (www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/...). Exciting! See below for how to get involved...

We've shipped a major update to the JOSS submission scope requirements, affecting what is eligible for submission and what information we require from authors.

You can read more about the changes and our motivations here: blog.joss.theoj.org/2026/01/prep... #joss #opensource #openscience

🚨 Pre-announcement! 🚨

We’re hiring for 2 x two-year, full-time roles to join me and the wider @palaeoverse.bsky.social team @es-ucl.bsky.social.

- Research Software Engineer (REF: B04-06999): lnkd.in/eNRBiPnP

- Community Engagement Coordinator (REF: B04-06998): lnkd.in/ejUACCzn