Baran Karapunar

The Academic Wheel of Privilege showing the 24 socio-cultural identities. The 24 socio-cultural identity types span six sectors: health and wellbeing, society, culture and communication, gender and sexuality, education and career, living arrangements and lastly childhood and development. These identity types are shown as circles connected to three concentric rings (outer, middle and inner) of “identity” circles with increasing privilege as you go towards the centre.

Out now!

The Academic Wheel of Privilege 🎡

We developed a framework & app to guide authorship teams in making equitable and thoughtful authorship decisions.

@saralilplants.bsky.social, @justinsulik.bsky.social, Bethan Iley, Mahmoud Elsherif, @flavioazevedo.bsky.social

🔗 osf.io/preprints/me...

Wow. Foraminifera!

ROV pilots paused and carefully zoomed in to collect footage of these single-celled microorganisms, or protists, at 843 m during the #OBVI #LivingBioreactors expedition w/ @schmidtsciences.bsky.social offshore of Argentina. Read the full caption: youtube.com/shorts/Yv_ud...

I travelled through Tupelo, Mississippi and came across a hillside made up of fossil oyster shells. These come from the Late Cretaceous (Campanian) Demopolis Formation. This is what was left from an ancient ocean ~76 million years ago. Pycnodonte mutabilis are the most common ones found. 🌊

Murex Sea Snail moving YouTube video by PreeOcean

MOaR Murex for #molluscmonday youtube.com/shorts/XZxum...

Murex Sea Snail Crawls YouTube video by PreeOcean

videos of living Venus comb Murex are always impressive! #molluscmonday youtube.com/shorts/m_r7T...

A small pale yellow gastropod shell has eroded out of a shell bed, with about a dozen robe-like ridges.

A single clam shell has been subjected to to much weathering, and is fracturing apart, the little bit of matrix inside the shell is just barely holding the slowly separating fragments

A lovely tall-spired gastropod shell sits on a sandy beach.

Oregon trip, part 3: @paleowin.bsky.social, myself, and a couple others visited the middle Pleistocene Port Orford Formation in SW Oregon to look for rare Pleistocene marine mammals. We didn't find any, but visiting without finding many incredible fossil mollusks is impossible!

A recent enquiry made us fall in love/awe with Elizabeth Gray (1831-1924) all over again These photographs of Mrs Gray, an intrepid Scottish fossil collector, were taken around her 90th birthday in 1922-23. Happy International Women’s Day!

'Time scales and gaps' - The River Reporter Much of our understanding of Earth’s past is derived from stratigraphic records exposed in rock outcrops or recovered from drilled cores. These records span immense time intervals, from thousands …

A popular article about our recent study on the nature of measurement gaps and their scaling in empirical chronologies.
www.riverreporter.com/stories/time...
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

Ready to start your own lab? Interested in #GlobalChange,#Biodiversity and #Ecosystem#Resilience? Join us in Göttingen - we are looking for a (female) Junior Research Group Leader in #EcologicalNovelty.
Attractive conditions, see euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/415857 - please share widely if you can!

Photograph of a fossil fish skull in right lateral view. The bone is dark brown/black against a gray matrix.

Out now in Contributions from me and @gilespalaeo.bsky.social, a deep dive into an early member of the sturgeon and paddlefish lineage. Bear with me, but there’s a long backstory highlighting uncertainty about the anatomy of living species and how well-studied fossils can still yield new insights.

Spiral tube worm (Spirorbis spirorbis) casings on a piece of Serrated wrack (Fucus serratus).
County Clare, Ireland.

Cormacscoast.com walking tours

A mosasaur skull biting an opalised ammonite fossil Source : https://korite.com/blogs/news/ammonites-with-mosasaur-bite-marks?srsltid=AfmBOoqTN4Qe49bVvReHFPzimOh67nwYzY17F6F_9MFe8P_miYSqZ-5j

🧵A scientific cold case for #FossilFriday

For decades, mysterious holes in fossil ammonite shells were attributed to mosasaur bites.

But what if the real culprit was even more terrifying...

Let me tell you about one of these little debates that makes palaeontology so cool👇

A brontothere skull displayed to highlight the the unique teeth used to sheer soft vegetation in the Eocene.

#FossilFriday The impressive teeth of an Eocene brontothere displayed in Vernal’s Utah Field House museum.

Top predators still prowled the seas after the biggest mass extinction The end-Permian extinction 252 million years ago wiped out over 80 per cent of marine species, but many ecosystems still had complex food webs despite the losses

The end-Permian extinction 252 million years ago wiped out over 80 per cent of marine species, but many ecosystems still had complex food webs despite the losses

Cover of the journal Nature, featuring the head of a large fish with its mouth open. A smaller fish is swimming into its mouth. The cover reads "Caught in Time: Early fossils shed light on the origins of bony fish."

Osteichthyans--the bony fishes--are by far the most diverse group of living jawed vertebrates. Two papers out today in @nature.com feature remarkable new Chinese fossils that paint a picture of substantial morphological diversity among stem osteichthyans.

Some Cambrian mollusks (1-8) and a mollusk-like problematic fossil (9) Source: https://www.app.pan.pl/archive/published/app45/app45-119.pdf

It's not unknown that mollusks adapted to many environments, but the rate at which they evolved is uncanny. In the first 100 million years they were around, they developed a new traits about every 2 million years (which is relatively fast for multicelled organisms). 🧪

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New paper out from @hoehna.bsky.social Lab, led by the brilliant @bjorntko.bsky.social! We applied the Pesto software (Kopperud & Höhna, 2025) to look at lineage-specific shifts in diversification rate on large, densely-sampled phylogenies across the Tree of Life doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Differences in #extinction selectivity and their relationship to functional traits in late #Cenozoic #mollusks

peerj.com/articles/207...

@peerj.bsky.social

#Paleontology #Evolution #Conservation

Figure from Li, L., Kolle, S., Weaver, J. C., Ortiz, C., Aizenberg, J., & Kolle, M. (2015). A highly conspicuous mineralized composite photonic architecture in the translucent shell of the blue-rayed limpet. Nature Communications, 6(1), 6322.

Figure from Li, L., Kolle, S., Weaver, J. C., Ortiz, C., Aizenberg, J., & Kolle, M. (2015). A highly conspicuous mineralized composite photonic architecture in the translucent shell of the blue-rayed limpet. Nature Communications, 6(1), 6322.

Figure from Li, L., Kolle, S., Weaver, J. C., Ortiz, C., Aizenberg, J., & Kolle, M. (2015). A highly conspicuous mineralized composite photonic architecture in the translucent shell of the blue-rayed limpet. Nature Communications, 6(1), 6322.

It's #MolluscMonday, so here's the Limpet facts ep. 2:

The small blue-rayed limpet got its bright colors (and name) not from blue pigments but from light being puzzled in a zigzag crystallographically co-oriented calcite lamellae.

Function ? Look like a toxic nudibranch (Batesian mimic) !

🦑🧪🌊

Left. extract from Strickland's 1845 paper 'On certain Calcareo-corneous Bodies found in the outer chambers of Ammonites' which begins by acknowledging Mary Anning; right portrait of Strickland as a young man, seated and holding an open book.

2 March 1811, Reighton, Yorkshire: birth of geologist and naturalist Hugh Strickland. In 1841 #MaryAnning drew his attention to a feature of ammonite shells which she thought were ink sacs but were in fact aptychi, plates used for closing off the aperture of the shell. #MolluscMonday

This is exactly what we have discussed in the PRIME workshop within the taxonomic scope of extinctions: whether individual clades show different extinction rate patterns, and we concluded that they followed largely simultaneous rate elevations. I will read in detail their conclusions.

Methods for knowledge-based biodiversity monitoring and management under uncertainty (BioM) - UiO:Life Science BioM develops new interdisciplinary methods to model and govern biodiversity under uncertainty, combining ecology, statistics, and philosophy. The project delivers predictive tools, normative framewor...

2 PhD & 1 postdoc available at BioM in Oslo
www.uio.no/english/rese... Interdisciplinary methods to model and govern biodiversity under uncertainty. Re-post widely! Work with statistical ecologists Olav Skarpaas (Natural History Museum Oslo @uio.no) @t-ergon.bsky.social

Last week, amidst the hoopla over a new Speen, @fishfetisher.bsky.social suggested a review of naming papers in fancy journals in response to a post by @daveyfwright.bsky.social - I got bored after work and now I have (some) data!

🧵👇

#FossilFriday
#CharismaticTaxaAreOverrated

A pile of grey rocks packed with ammonites and bivalves

Chunks of the Charmouth Liassic sea bed for #fossilfriday. Crammed full of ammonites and bivalves, slowly being reclaimed by the sea

Judith Pardo-Pérez and I are organizing a dedicated ichthyosaur symposium at @ipc7.bsky.social 🤩 Hope to see very many interesting abstracts! Get in touch if there are questions.

Read this thread. @dralexdunhill.bsky.social at his finest, showcasing our @ukri.org funded work led by @barankarapunar.bsky.social with deep support from @tanyadoesscience.bsky.social. No global collapse of food webs across the Permian–Triassic Mass Extinction (PTME)

...and eventually the most long awaited starter pack: the one to connect all those interested in molluscs! Please message me if you prefer to opt out or if you wish to suggest new members (just briefly add the reason) go.bsky.app/Eh4qpKr

🚨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 Paper] Provides the first description of cold seep fauna in the Sea of Japan, revealing just a few species living in very cold water. We also found a new snail species -- named Provanna cocytus after the icy hell in Dante's "Divine Comedy"!
OPEN ACCESS: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/...

A covarion model for phylogenetic estimation using discrete morphological datasets Abstract. The rate of evolution of a single morphological character is not homogeneous across the phylogeny and this rate heterogeneity varies between morp

Our new paper 'A covarion model for phylogenetic estimation using discrete morphological datasets,' is out in SysBio!
We introduce the "covariomorph" model in RevBayes to capture character and lineage specific rates of morphological traits.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/sysb...