Alec Wilken, PhD

Scientists Discovered the Origin of Human Ears in the Skull of an Ancient Creature While Thrinaxodon liorhinus didn’t yet have the sophisticated hearing equipment of modern mammals, it shows that eardrums began evolving much earlier than assumed.

Check out this great write up of our Thrinaxodon hearing paper featured in Popular Mechanics! 👂🙉🌽

www.popularmechanics.com/science/a701...

Understanding avian palate evolution is a challenge too big for any one research group to shoulder alone and our interpretations of these fascinating fossils will always keep evolving! This is how science moves forward. Give it a read! (3/n)

Remarkable new fossils have enriched our knowledge of bird palate evolution but create new questions. Here we highlight ongoing problems presented by new fossils like Janavis (2/n)

While we didn’t mean to ruffle any feathers with our last paper on the evolution of cranial kinesis in birds, we are grateful for the opportunity to keep the conversation going! Check out our response to Benito et al. out today in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/n)

It's so great to see this project come out. I'm very grateful to my collaborators, Callum Ross, Chelsie Snipes, and Zhe-Xi Luo. We're appreciative of the support from the University of Chicago and the NIH

And we estimate that a shift to tympanic hearing in our lineage likely occurred in early cynodonts (8/n)

Armed with the knowledge that the tympanic membrane could conduct sound even on a ear attached to the mandible, we performed some phylogenetic analyses (7/n)

...meaning the tympanic membrane was the most sensitive conductor of sound for Thrinaxodon (6/n)

We found that the tympanic membrane transmitted the most sound pressure... (5/n)

By doing this we could capture the middle ear biomechanics of a 250 million year old animal! (4/n)

Here we used FEA to test how effective various potential sound receivers on the mandibular middle ear of a generalized cynodont like Thrinaxodon could be (3/n)

Our middle ear evolved from the jaw joint of our earlier synapsid ancestors. How did our ancestors hear with an ear rigidly attached to the jaw? (2/n)

🚨New paper alert🚨 Check out our new paper on the biomechanics of hearing in our cynodont ancestors! pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/n)

Paramyxoviruses in Old World fruit bats (Pteropodidae): An open database and synthesis of sampling effort, viral positivity, and coevolution Author summary Paramyxoviruses are a family of viruses that include the human measles and mumps viruses as well as emerging zoonoses like Hendra and Nipah henipaviruses. These henipaviruses spill over...

We created a database of all published paramyxovirus detection attempts in pteropodid bats! Lots of sampling gaps and avenues for future study ⬇️ Excited to share this PhD chapter with @danjbecker.bsky.social and @viralemergence.org, out last month in @plos.org 🦇🦠🔓

journals.plos.org/plosntds/art...