Ecstatic to share our new paper on skull evolution in placental mammals, highlighted on the cover of
@ScienceMagazine
! With a 3d dataset spanning the Cenozoic, we describe a new model of attenuated evolution & identify traits associated w/fast evolution 1/
It occurred to me this morning that cats may be, from a biological perspective, perfect animals. What other group varies so much in size but not much else (except coat pattern) and can still have so many species coexisting? It’s because, evolutionarily, they nailed it.
#Caturday
I’m not normally a hat person (blame my big hair), but I’ll make an exception for this one. So honoured to take the helm as President
@LinneanSociety
, mindful of the lineage I join & how unlike the portraits that line this room I am, as we change the face of science & leadership.
As President
@LinneanSociety
I am beyond ecstatic to share the news that we have secured our home at Burlington House for 999 years & can now focus on our crucial work for the understanding & protection of nature. Thank you to everyone who helped achieve this wonderful outcome!
We are delighted to have reached an agreement with UK Government to stay in our home at Burlington House.
The deal will enable us to share our Collections, engage with the public, and work on behalf of the natural world for years to come.
Read more at
Cranky confession: whenever I see a new paper with several authors, I count how many women are listed. For vert paleo & evolutionary biology, the # is often 0. There are many stellar women in the field. Boys, please take a hard look at your collaborative networks & open them up.
NERC just denied my deadline extension request for the grant call closing the day after schools reopen because it "would be unfair to others" & that we have had sufficient time to adjust. As though homeschooling alongside a full- time job is something that gets easier with time.
8 years ago (5 + covid & maternity extensions), I embarked on my massive
@ERC_Research
ADaPTIVE project & now that all the final reports are in, I am taking a few minutes on this
#FossilFriday
to reflect on our extraordinary adventure to reconstruct tetrapod skull evolution 1/
I was prepared to give a seminar on my research
@royalsociety
and to participate in the admissions ceremony to sign the big book of fellows, but I was definitely not expecting to hold the mace of King Charles II, given to the society on its founding in 1660!
Somebody pinch me -it still feels like a dream! It’s amazing to receive this recognition for my work. It hasn’t always been easy. Many times it has been very, very hard to pursue this field & career (that’s a thread for another day), but today I feel very lucky & deeply honoured.
Professor Anjali Goswami FRS is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is an evolutionary biologist at
@NHM_London
, specialising in vertebrate evolution and development, particularly in the emerging area of evolutionary phenomics.
#RSFellows
So honoured to be elected by the fellowship during a critical period for our society, as we expand our reach & impact with
@LinneanLearning
& fight to keep our home
#LinneanAtBH
. Also very proud to serve as
@LinneanSociety
first
@MinoritySTEM
president in its 233 year history!
Please welcome Professor Anjali Goswami, our President-Elect 2022!
Prof Goswami is a Research Leader in Life Sciences, Dean of Postgrad Edu at the Natural History Museum, and Hon. Professor of Palaeobiology at UCL. Read about our Council members here:
Grant funded!!!!! Cannot wait to get stuck into suture evolution and skull function in all these crazy mammals and non-mammalian synapsids with
@heather_e_white
@AlanaCSharp
& collabs! Thanks,
@LeverhulmeTrust
!
Extremely honoured to receive the President’s Medal from
@ThePalAss
! Huge thanks to my family, friends, lab members & colleagues who helped me get here & to the random woman at that party freshman year
@UMich
who told me about the intro geology course that led me down this path.
@anjgoswami
has been awarded the President's Medal, a mid-career prize for those who have made an outstanding contribution and we expect will continue to do so. Prof. Goswami is a world-leading vertebrate palaeontologist and evolutionary morphologist
@NHM_London
Got home from work a bit late today to find my 8 yo waiting up to tell me that she got into an argument (and won obv) at school about the phylogenetic affiliations of Dimetrodon. I just don’t think it’s possible to be more proud of her than I am right now.
Dear fellow scientists: It's okay to disagree with each other, and it's important part of our work. It is not okay to be an asshole about it. Petty arguments & an obsession with scoring points are ruining science. Let's all look at how we contribute to this and try to be nicer.
#FossilFriday
Job Alert! If you love skulls & macroevolution & are looking for a postdoc, apply for this 2yr
@LeverhulmeTrust
-funded post
@NHM_London
on suture evolution through the synapsid-mammal transition. Open to int'l apps. Deadline March 3. Details:
Check out this gorgeous beast currently blocking my parents’ driveway in Michigan! 18” carapace, looks like that’s near the maximum for the species (Eastern snapping
#turtle
, Chelydra serpentina)
My dad turned 80 this year (or 81, not sure what year he was born) and has a long list of places he wants to see while he’s still able to able to travel. Yesterday we ticked a big one off the list.
#goals
#family
#bucketlist
Paper accepted & even more exciting, we got to celebrate in person! This one is a big deal for me, my 1st paper with morphometrics hero
@MZelditch
, on what modularity means & how we study it. This ~3 yr effort was tons of fun to discuss & write - look out for it soon in Evo&Devo!
My 6-year-old just inadvertently summarized the past 20 years of my scie ntific career when she woke up from a nightmare, found me doing some late night data collection & asked "are you still landmarking skulls?" Sigh. Yes, yes I am. In fact, I landmarked this same skull in 2002.
Massive congratulations to DR
@EllenCoombs
for passing her PhD viva yesterday!!! Ellen’s thesis is an extraordinary study of whale evolution & she is heading west to continue her amazing work with a fellowship
@NMNH
! We’ll miss you but you are always whalecome home
@NHM_London
!
All alone with Hope and Darwin is the perfect way to end the year! Not a day goes by that I don’t feel grateful getting walk past these two on my way to my office. Thanks for a fabulous 2019, and see you both in 2020!
#bestjobever
All I want for
#InternationalWomensDay
is more women in leadership in science & government.
We are half the population, but I’ve never had a female boss or president. Men, if you really want to be good allies & support diversity, here’s what you do: Put women in charge.
#IWD2020
So excited to be part of this massive collaboration on mammal
#brain
size led by Jeroen Smaers and published today
@ScienceAdvances
! Turns out a lot of evolutionarily changes in relative brain size aren’t about brains at all, so check those human biases!
Our new paper is out
@PLOSBiology
! The broadest 3D study of
#dinosaur
&
#bird
skull diversity to date, sampling 391 species including
@NHM_London
stars
#Dippy
&
#Sophie
, we show that skull evolution slowed down dramatically as birds took off. Check it out:
When it comes to skull diversity, slow and steady wins the race. Our new paper on dinosaur skull evolution is out now in
@PLOSBiology
. Using 3D morphometrics and evolutionary modeling, we show how birds have slow-evolving dinosaur skulls
I wish that, in addition to acknowledgements, scientific papers had dedications, e.g. Supplementary Figures 12-25 and Supplementary Tables S4-13 are dedicated to Reviewer 3...
Or that it is more fair to compare work from people with & without caring duties during this period. When future articles discuss the impact of covid-19 on academic parents, please note that grant agencies knew the impact, were asked for help, but chose to do nothing.
Excited to kick off my lab's move to
@NHM_London
with out new
#OA
@PNASNews
paper led by
@rfelice
on bird skull evodevo & macroevolution + 322 3D scans for free download on , including our reconstructed hypothetical ancestral bird!
For an evolutionary biologist, everything about Galápagos really is overwhelming, but I especially enjoyed visiting
@DarwinFound
yesterday! Would be great to see some of their amazing research in
@LinneanSociety
journals, where Darwin published the first description of evolution!
I ❤️ marsupials, especially weird fossils, but I can't deny they aren't as diverse as placentals. Our new
@RSocPublishing
paper, out today & led by
@grumpyDrFabre
, uses jaw shape to show they also evolve more slowly, likely due to developmental constraints
Stop calling crocs living fossils! There's a lot more going on in crocodyliform skull evolution than you might think, especially in their extinct diversity (& it's not all in the snout). Check out our
@RSocPublishing
paper w/
@rfelice
@poldiego
for more !
New paper out in
@RSocPublishing
with
@anjgoswami
@poldiego
! We used 3D morphometrics to quantify whole-skull variation and evolution in crocs and their relatives. The suprising result? Crocs aren't living fossils! paper here:
Getting my props together to play “Name That Skull” and talk about digitising the diversity of life at the Hoop and Toy in South Kensington on Wednesday for the
#PintofScience
festival
#pint18
Devastated by the loss of 2 extraordinary & inspirational women this past week.
#RGB
&
@GMMace
fought tirelessly to make this world a better place; one focused on how we treat each other, the other on how we treat our planet. They leave gigantic shoes to fill, let’s get to work.
We got the whole gang together (actually a few gangs) for a 9 hour power session to finish off our new team-written review paper on
#AI
for evolutionary morphology. 50 pages and 6 case studies later, the preprint is out! . Website w/ links to tools up soon!
Cranky Confessions: Coronavirus edition - I'm glad people are talking about how this pandemic is exacerbating inequalities in academia for women with kids. I'd be much happier if editors, funders, reviewers & journalists also did something about it. 1/8
Tune in to Inside Science
@BBCRadio4
this afternoon at 16:30 to hear
@AdamRutherford
& I discuss why skulls are so interesting, including more on our recent study of dinosaur & bird skull evolution & my lab’s broader
@ERC_Research
tetrapod skull project!
For obvious reasons, I don't have a group photo for
#WomenInScienceDay2021
, so let me tell you about the amazing women in my group
@NHM_London
, including several new members and more that are starting over the next few months:
What really makes me irritated about this deadline is that it is literally the day after schools reopen. You would think extending a week or two to allow academic parents to be able to focus on proposals without kids running around isn't too much to ask, but apparently it is.
Such an amazing find from just after the K/Pg extinction, w/ great fossils of plants & animals. Here’s hoping there are more sites like this waiting to be found across the world! Also chuffed I managed to sound extremely pretentious in
@nytimes
...
Completely random birthday wandering around south London and look where we ended up! Can’t believe I’ve never taken my kids to see
@cpdinosaurs
before, and very proud they liked the mammals the best :)
I reckon Dylan must rank pretty high on the list of most enthusiast attendees of one of
@NHMdinolab
’s lectures. And although a tad disruptive, isn’t it a little helpful to have someone yell out “dinosaur” at the start of every slide, in case you lose focus?
@CEEvol
#Wallmas2018
A mere 14 months after we last gathered all together in the lab, with two Phd and two postdocs completed, three new PhD and a postdoc started, it was overwhelmingly wonderful to see this lovely group in person again!
And if you want to look closer at this crazy diversity of living and fossil placental mammals, nearly all of the 3d scans, barring a few due to institutional restrictions, are available at and . I highly recommend Arsinotherium. End/
My little girl turns 8 today! This time last year, we promised that we’d reschedule her birthday party as soon as possible. She didn’t even bother to ask this year 💔, but if you can share your best cute and/or interesting animal pics, that’d make her day!
#LockdownBirthday
Both delighted and a little nervous about this
@sciam
interview in which I go on the record with my expert opinion that bats & rodents are so diverse because suck at everything (ok, except flying for bats). Cats on the other hand are
#purrfect
…
Gorgeous first day in the Middle Atlas mountains of Morocco with
@Tweetisaurus
@kawtar_ech
, Driss & Khadija, getting the lay of the beautiful land, searching for Middle Jurassic microvertebrate sites & occasionally getting stuck up very high & slippery slopes. Bring on day 2!
Today in
#WFH
, woke up early to make slides for my 1st virtual conference, went for a run to calm nerves, wiped out, smashing my watch & bloodying up my arm, gave talk to ~500 attendees of
@CGeometrica
, cracked a beer & watched My Little Pony (with my kids). Bring on the weekend!
Cranky confession 2: When I read a paper in a field I know well, I check if major women in the field are cited (usually not/little, or negatively) & tally cited papers led by women/minorities. It’s usually <20%, but rarely for lack of relevant papers. Citations matter. Do better!
@mkvand
@UnitedSpaceCats
I love Cryptoprocta! It’s not a lemur or a cat, it’s a different kind of carnivoran closely related to mongooses, but it really does looks just like a cat 🐱
But we’ll keep trying! Finally, a fun little detail for my fox-obsessed daughter. We always like to report on the biggest, weirdest, earliest, etc species. Well, according to our study, the most average living placental mammal is a fox. 10/
Excited to announce the new
@SVP_vertpaleo
Futures Award to support
@MinoritySTEM
undergraduates to conduct summer research projects! SVP’s Past Presidents have raised a match challenge of $16,000 to fund this - please donate when you register for
#SVP2020
Proud that my lab meeting today included 8 team members calling in from 4 European countries with 3 different Four Seasons Total Landscaping zoom backgrounds.
What if, in addition to h-index, we had an equality or diversity index, where people had to report how many of their papers are co-authored by scientists from underrepresented groups, and this was evaluated in job/grant applications?
#WomenInSTEM
@MinoritySTEM
@tigerinstemm
Ho, ho, ho - did somebody ask Santa for a giant dataset of bird skull stls for immediate download, and maybe even a shiny OA paper explaining how development and integration have shaped their evolution and reconstructing their hypothetical ancestor? Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas!
A Christmas gift from me and
@anjgoswami
: 322 bird skull surface scans for download, including this festive version of our reconstruction of the hypothetical ancestral neornithine. Check out the paper in PNAS tomorrow!
Our new paper on the role of metamorphosis on the evolution and diversification of salamanders is out! Check the results of this amazing collaboration here
I will never cease to be amazed by how some academics can justify being terrible to their students and BAME colleagues in private while simultaneously and publicly claiming to be supportive mentors and allies.
People, at least try to live up your own tweets.
New job alert! 3-year
@LeverhulmeTrust
-funded postdoc on pelagiarian fish skull modularity & evolution using high-density 3D geometric morphometrics. Based
@NHM_London
w/ Zerina Johanson & me & working w/
@GilesPalaeoLab
&
@Friedman_Lab
. Details & apply at
Absolutely idyllic lab away day in the library
@LinneanSociety
yesterday! I can’t believe we’ve never thought to do this before - thanks
@heather_e_white
for the suggestion and
@isacharmant
for inspiring everyone with a tour of the collections!
A pox on reviewers who suggest major revisions and also tick the box that they are not willing to review revised versions of a manuscript. Why does anyone do this? As an editor, I really hate bringing in new reviewers on revised submissions, it feels unfair to everyone involved.
Day 1 of Cretaceous fieldwork in South India & we’re off to a great start with theropods, sauropods, crocs & turtles, plus lots of tiny indet bones! We have to make the most of our trip as sadly much of our field area has disappeared under crops & the rest won’t be far behind.
So excited to see this paper out in
@NatureEcoEvo
! This was a huge collaborative effort led by
@grumpyDrFabre
to capture salamander skulls in incredible detail & measure the impact of life cycle on their evolution. Check out her blog piece for more:
Our new paper on the role of metamorphosis on the evolution and diversification of salamanders is out! Check the results of this amazing collaboration here
Congratulations to DR
@heather_e_white
, who passed her PhD viva with flying colours yesterday!!! Her excellent thesis on the development of cranial sutures & how to measure them has set the stage for her postdoc extending this to the fossil record of mammals - watch this space!
New job alert
#2
! As part of our
@LeverhulmeTrust
-funded project on fish skull evolution
@NHM_London
, we are hiring a full-time 3yr research assistant to gather & process CT scans. Both this & the related 3yr postdoc position close on June 10. Details:
Hot
#job
application tip: put your name in the filename of your CV or cover letter, so your application isn't one of many that just says CV.pdf or coverletter.pdf. Otherwise, the first thing your potential employer will do is get a bit annoyed while they change them all...
Congratulations, Dr. Bardua! Passed with minor corrections! Thanks to Christophe Soligo and Marcello Ruta for apparently a very enjoyable viva! Bring on the fizz and the incredible
#amphibian
themed presents!
#proudsupervisor
@CarlaBardua
Everything you wanted to know about surface sliding semilandmarks but were afraid to ask! Our new
#OA
@iobopen
paper by
@CarlaBardua
@rfelice
@akiopteryx
& AC Fabre details the process in excruciating detail, complete with annotated 3D images in sketchfab:
Frustrated from sitting in panel meetings & seeing firsthand that the impacts of school closures are not considered at all in grant decisions. Short extensions are not enough to balance the exhaustion of parents working on proposals & responses after long days of homeschooling!
For her 5th birthday party, Iyla requested a chocolate cake with rainbow frosting and the Disney princesses and Batman fighting a monster to save some babies.
#NailedIt
So excited to be heading back to India for hunt for Late Cretaceous fossils after a 4 year hiatus! This time I am bringing 2 new assistants selected by my kids to report back on our adventures: Hobby & Luna, here enjoying the first leg of every trip, Piccadilly line to Heathrow!