Joseph Keating

Well twitter, its been fun, but its time to migrate. You can find me on @evopalaeo.bsky.social

@VidiotsOfficial mirror.co.uk/news/weird-new…

🥳 We would like to share a newly uploaded video on the #PalAss YouTube channel: 🎥 Palaeontologists Explain: How Do Fossils Form? ⬇️ 🔗  youtube.com/watch?v=LwF7qn… #palaeontology #fossil #youtube #video #channel #new

Brown Nugget has just finished 20,925,000 ancestral state estimations. 🫡 I realise that without context, this makes no sense.

Making lectures and inserting outdated memes. @RussellGarwood would be proud.

@ButlerLabBham @MarkWitton @Nitroshutter @SVP_vertpaleo @Palaeo_Bham 🤟

For everyone interesting in exploring phylogenetic or macroevolutionary models and methods, TREvoSim v3 has been released 🤩 joss.theoj.org/papers/10.2110…

New Paper Alert. @Ella_Nicklin leads our new paper in @Dev_Bio_Journal Evolution, development, and regeneration of tooth-like epithelial appendages in sharks. What do all 'odontodes' have in common? Is a tooth, just a tooth? #sharks #teeth #skinteeth sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

@NHMdinolab Yes indeed. And that was partly the inspiration for this paper - particularly answering the question: do different coding strategies give different results? I would have thought so, but actually model and outgroups seem to be more important.

@evopalaeo Looks a lot like the conclusions we reached in Campione et al. (2020)!

When did feathers evolve? Are bird feathers homologous with pterosaur tufts? Check out our new preprint, lead by the fantastic Pierre Cockx. We use different models, outgroups and coding strategies to clarify feather evolution. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

@sahinmy @nrken19 If you are referring to mammalian hair, almost certainly the former. If you are talking about pterosaur fuzz, our study suggests that it independently evolved from scales, although the minority of models support a single origin of feathers/fuzz, followed by multiple losses.

@evopalaeo @nrken19 Did hair and feathers evolve separately from scales or do hair and feathers have a common ancestor closer than scales?

BentonFest: A celebration of the career of Professor Michael Benton @BristolPalaeo invites you to a research symposium of leading researchers, celebrating Mike's astonishing career, Friday 6th September 2024 @BristolUni Reserve your free place: shorturl.at/v9ZC2

🧽🧽🧽 How did sponges get their spicules? ⭐⭐⭐ Find out here:

Super proud to announce my first publication: doi.org/10.1098/rsos.2…. A big thanks to all those involved, @jfabrombacher @anjgoswami @tomezard, Alex Searle-Barnes and Marisa Sweeney!

A new interpretation of Pikaia reveals the origins of the chordate body plan: Current Biology cell.com/current-biolog…

Chuffed to bits with my Diademaspis, one of the first fossils I ever worked on, brought to life by James McKay @YorksFossilFest

In sunny Redcar for @YorksFossilFest this weekend. Found my first fossil already...

@Tweetisaurus @BBCRadio4 @jimalkhalili I've just seen this, I'm fuming, did they do no background research? There are soo many more deserving palaeontologist who they could have interviewed @BBCRadio4 @jimalkhalili

@robinmdbeck I'll add it to the to do list!

Introducing treesurgeon (github.com/evo-palaeo/tre…), a new R package of tools and tricks for working with phylogenetic trees and data, especially morphology! Here's a few things it can do...

This is very much a work in progress and I'm keen to get feedback. Let me know what you think!

There is also a function for computing tree to tree distances in parallel using the foreach package. This will allow you to visualise tree spaces with large numbers of trees!