Martin R Smith
@PalaeoSmith
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Invertebrate palaeontologist studying the origins of life's rich diversity. Now at: https://t.co/y5P9TwqmXK
Durham, UK
Joined May 2014
Hermit crabs were late to the party: Penis worms lived in borrowed shells 340 million years earlier.
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Our understanding of Mass Extinctions is distorted if we neglect sequence stratigraphy.
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Fossilized chlorophyll (?!) in a billion-year-old alga.
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Our new paper uses Bayesian astrochronology to date the origin of trilobites with extreme precision. Read it here:
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TreeSearch: Morphological Phylogenetic Analysis in R. Now published, with usage notes, in R Journal.
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Did cephalopod jaws evolve from a shell-sealing operculum?.
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Deep homologies: The same genes regulate limb development in cephalopods, arthropods and vertebrates – but not, intriguingly, annelids.
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My take on deuterostome origins – reflections on recent Rotadiscus research. Read free:
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A fine-grained view on macroevolution:.Palaeozoic diversity recalculated with 26 000 year resolution.
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Amazing imagery of 100 million year old velvet worm in amber – it could have died yesterday!
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Trilobites keeping clean: leg adaptations for grooming gills.
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Two new papers using X-ray CT to dissect Chengjiang arthropods in exquisite detail:.
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A Cambrian Fireworks Show: Did multiple evolutionary radiations comprise the "Cambrian Explosion"?.
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TreeSearch v1.1 now on CRAN. Parsimony analysis in R, with exploration of rogue taxa ( and tree spaces ( . Try it yourself:
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The evolutionary history of fungi. A nice review of fossil and genomic data
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PhD opportunity using exceptional fossils to establish the origins of squid.
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The eagerly awaited description of the Collins' Monster, a bizarre Burgess Shale beast.
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Are the earliest bryozoans. actually seaweeds?. Our new material finds a new place for dasyclad algae in the Cambrian explosion.
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Could the aragonitic Ediacaran scleritome of Corumbella bridge the gap between cnidarians and bilaterians?.
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My take on the "battle of phylogenetic methods":. - Bayesian and implied weights = equally useful. - Equal weights parsimony = bad. - Bremer support = bad. - Robinson-Foulds distance = misleading.
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A "modern" group of annelids turns up in the Cambrian:. Our new take on Iotuba reveals a hidden polychaete radiation.
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Mapping trees helps understand phylogenetic results – but widely used methods can be misleading. - My recommendations for effective analysis (now typeset): - Try it yourself in my "MapTrees" R GUI:
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Echinoid origins: Here's how to combine palæontological and phylogenomic data.
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How the machaeridians rolled: sclerite articulation in these extinct annelid oddballs.
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PhD opportunity: the macroevolutionary story of cephalopod origins.
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Some new Precambrian eukaryotes: Thalli and possible fungi from the Proterozoic.
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Fundamental problems with the Robinson-Foulds metric: and what to use instead. New methods for comparing phylogenetic trees.
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Dickinsonia on the move: directional motion in an Ediacaran organism .
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Hyoliths ancestrally had pedicles! A new, phylogenetically informed view on the origin of brachiopods:.
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The story hidden in sets of phylogenetic trees: my takes on tree space analysis and finding rogue taxa. 1: 2:
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Join us in Durham! Two openings for Assistant Professors in Earth Sciences (broadly defined)
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A molluscan Jurassic Park: could we bring back the long-extinct Multiplacophorans with some developmental tweaks?.
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Fossils are more phylogenetically instructive than living species (at least in rodents).
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How to make an animal trace fossil. if you're a microbial mat.
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Is Dickinsonia just the 'foot' of an animal with an umbrella-like spicule-bearing canopy?.
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More complex organisms are larger—and each level of complexity has its 'optimal size'.
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The mystery of hyoliths solved: they had a brachiopod-like lophophore!
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Born out of crisis: the brittle star body-plan arose in response to a Silurian environmental catastrophe.
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Another new Cambrian oddity, with a crown of (chaetognath-like?) mouthparts.
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Ecological versatility, not arrival order, dictates which lineages radiate.
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Join the Smith Lab: postdoc opportunity developing a Bayesian approach to stratigraphic correlation.Closes 26 Aug
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They don't come much smaller than this. centimetre-scale Hurdiid from the Welsh Ordovician.
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Burrowing before the Cambrian: Ediacaran Arenicolites are not meant to exist!
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Ediacaran 'cloudinomorph' tube-worms may be a polyphyletic ensemble of bilaterians and non-bilaterians.
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Just out: a detailed and current review of the Sirius Passet Lagerstatte.
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Phosphatized stem-group pentastomid from the Cambrian – amazing Orsteny fossils!.
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Burgess Shale-type preservation from the Ordovician of Portugal.
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Next term I'm teaching "current controversies in palaeo". Beyond the Ediacaran–Cambrian, what shouldn't I miss?.
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The fossil record was right after all: Bivalves and scaphopods are sister taxa.
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One more body plan traces its origins back to the Cambrian: these beautiful loriciferans lived between sand grains.
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A Chengjiang arthropod preserved in exquisite 3D detail .
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The origin and rise of complex life:.Special issue of Interface Focus with some very important papers.
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Fungus-like fossils reported from 2.4 BILLION year old lava! [summary:
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Everything you ever wanted to know about the fossil record of predation.
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Ventilation, not oxygen, as a trigger for the Cambrian explosion: wide-ranging perspective from Nick Butterfield.
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Off with their heads. genetically, tardigrades are simply disembodied arthropod heads.
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Want to improve resolution and branch support in your phylogenetic trees? Try removing rogue taxa. Paper now typeset: Try it in R:
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I'm hiring: 3-yr postdoctoral position to develop Bayesian approaches to correlation on geological time scales. Come help constrain the Cambrian explosion!.
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Halkieriids may be brachiopod relatives after all, based on new Chengjiang fossils
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Not just plants: Unicellular green algae from the Rhynie Chert, with beautiful confocal images.
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Are Ediacaran ecosystems complex because of competition for food — or different reproductive strategies?.
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Can blood be fossilized? Even in the Burgess Shale, the answer's probably no.
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Interactions between Ediacaran organisms reconstructed from spatial statistics:
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A very cute little Cambrian predator: adult-like morphology in juvenile Lyrarapax.
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Sponges undergird marine biodiversity:. Did their rise kick-start the Cambrian explosion?
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Palaeoscolecids are not priapulids: their mouthparts place them deeper in Ecdysozoan evolution.
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Modular (colonial?) construction of the frondose Ediacaran animal (!) Arborea.
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Taking the pulse of the Cambrian explosion: body size trends suggest waxing and waning productivity / O₂.
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"Sponge biomarkers" produced by rhizaria.More reason to query a deep fuse to the Cambrian Explosion.
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The "ancient helmet worm" Orthrozanclus, and the mobile history of early brachiopods?
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Long-awaited articulated camenellan has a surprise in store: annelidesque bristles, explaining homology of setae in Lophotrochozoa. A masterclass in careful fossil interpretation.
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Complete workflows for parsimony analysis via a point-and-click R interface: . - Handle inapplicable data.- Character reconstruction.- Map tree space.- Detect rogue taxa.- & more. TreeSearch 1.0 now available on CRAN.Paper coming soon.
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An algorithm for morphological phylogenetic analysis with inapplicable data (6 years in the making!) Try it yourself:
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Another PDRA opportunity: Bringing together fossils and stratigraphy to time the pace of the Cambrian explosion.
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Agnostids are trilobites after all. well almost. Beautiful new data from the Burgess Shale.
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#DidYouKnow that Palaeontology instantly reject any submission that has appeared as a preprint?. As it's not listed in the journal's policies, I thought it was worth sharing.
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Detailed study of new Burgess Shale material, and a consideration of Amiskwia as a Cambrian Gnathiferan
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How we handle inapplicable data can fundamentally change evolutionary interpretations. Our example re. Ecdysozoan origins is now typeset:.
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hox gene expression supports homology of brachiopod and annelid setae … (cf. …)
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Cambrian nerve cords become even harder to write off as taphonomic artefacts.
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SCFs, including a possible annelid, from a Terreneuvian impact crater.
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Tabulate corals helped their rugose cousins to survive. Another intriguing insight from spatial statistics!
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My image of the day: Four baby tardigrades developing in the moulted skin of their mother
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