We can learn unimaginable amount of things bout the history of life, climate, geosystems and the processes of evolution from the fossil record. But we need strong database curation and financing infrastructure.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-02985-8.pdf
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio
Sea dragon in the jaws of a fish:
"Finding embedded teeth, while rare, removes this ambiguity. Here we describe a tooth embedded in a mid-cervical vertebra of a subadult plesiosaur, Polycotylus latipinnis"
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02724634.2026.2625732#abstract
"Stem tetrapod" from the Early Permian. You can think about it as a "living fossil" holdover from the earliest Carboniferous. But as Jason and others explain it was specialized in its dentition, completely weird and possibly was herbivorous! A mixture of primitive and derived in unusual direction.
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/293/2066/20252106/480542/An-aberrant-stem-tetrapod-from-the-early-Permian
A popular article about our recent study on the nature of measurement gaps and their scaling in empirical chronologies.
https://www.riverreporter.com/stories/time-scales-and-gaps,249190
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio
'Time scales and gaps'

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 …

The River Reporter
The extreme unevenness in the completeness of the stratigraphic, and by implication fossil, record is formed by many processes. Apparently the most profound gap— the Great Unconformity, is driven by tectonics.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2523891123
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio
These kinds of studies are extremely important in deciphering from the mechanistic point-of-view the evolution of behaviors using time-calibrated trace fossil record.
First photo - Helminthopsis.
Second photo - Helminthoidichnites.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23324
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio
"We describe the only known example of a three-dimensionally mineralized heart, thick-walled stomach, and bilobed liver from arthrodire placoderms, stem gnathostomes from the Late Devonian Gogo Formation in Western Australia"
https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.abf3289
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

Wow, just wow. Even giant Spinosaurus are kind of cassowaries! 🤯
🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.adx5486

Synthesis article by
Niles Eldredge, Telmo Pievani and Ian Tattersall on the punctuated equilibria in relation to human evolution with the discussion of the environmental forcing and different kinds of hierarchies.
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Anthropology #Geology
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-13925-2_7
Punctuated Equilibrium and Human Evolution, 50 Years Later

The concept of punctuated equilibrium (PE) had three significant impacts on evolutionary thinking. The first was on the history of biological thought: the critique of a strict phyletic gradualism in paleontology and paleo-anthropology. The second was the theoretical...

SpringerLink
A very interesting article on the Bretskyan hierarchy mechanisms of the divergence in fishes:
"...gaps, such as the Sinaloan, Central American, and Galápagos breaks, consistently restricted gene flow"
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/293/2064/20252591/480177/Marine-barriers-and-seascape-features-shape
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Macroecology