iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Where the decolonizers (colonizers??? ;) ) spell Paleo incorrectly and the women spell paleo correctly. Yay women! Sorry Marc, wish I was there and we could hang.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

Calling Midwest Anatomists and Paleontologists! Deadlines Extended! Sept 1st for Talks and Posters! Sept 12th for registration. Look forward to seeing you here! @anatomyorg.bsky.social @paleosoc.bsky.social @societyofvertpaleo.bsky.social www.anatomy.org/.../Meetings...

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

Congratulations to Emma Cooney on graduating with a MS out of the lab. Stay tuned for some wicked cranial morphology.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

Happy to meet new people and share our work on imaging and informatics at @bionexuskc.bsky.social in Kansas City.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Good times with good people at AAA this week!

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American Association for Anatomy @anatomyorg.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Congratulations to our 2025 Class of Fellows! They were recognized at the Fellows reception tonight and received their AAA Fellows pin!🫀🧠 #Anatomy25 #anatomy #education #research #science #aaa #portlandoregon #scientificmeeting #annualmeeting

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Dr Stephan Lautenschlager @palaeostephan.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

This project has started a long time ago, but in a galaxy not too far away… Happy to share this new study with @taphonomist.bsky.social looking at the functional morphology and biomechanics of the Rancor. Warning! Nerdy sci fi, palaeo & biomechanics thread following! jgeekstudies.org/2025/03/08/i...

jgeekstudies.org

Is a bone a viable weapon when combating a Rancor? Estimating the bite force of an intergalactic mega-predator

Stephan Lautenschlager1,2 & Thomas Clements3 1School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. 2The Lapworth Museum of Geology, Birmingham, UK. 3…

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Reposted by Casey Holliday

Andrew Iwaniuk @evoneuro.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

New paper out today! Here we examine how a simple behaviour, head scratching, has evolved in birds. There are some relatively complex changes going on that vary across clades, as demonstrated by @gallinaciega.bsky.social analyses. www.frontiersin.org/journals/eth... #birds #ornithology #evolution 🪶

A 6 panel figure from this paper. On the left are photos of a cormorant, lorikeet, kingfisher, and songbird scratching their heads with one foot. On the right are two different phylogenetic trees of avian orders with head scratching pattern (underwing or overwing) mapped on top.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

If you’re hanging out at the 5th Palaelontolgical Virtual Congress, and you like crocs (or even not!) visit my talk here and join the comments! www.palaeovc.org/6/great-tran...

palaeovc.org

SPOTLIGHT TALK: GREAT TRANSFORMATIONS IN CROCODYLIFORM EVOLUTION • Palaeo VC

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

This means that the temporal muscles of birds are more fore-aft oriented compared to the more vertical muscles of their dinosaur ancestors. This shows a change in feeding behaviors, from bitey, stiff skulls of early dinosaurs to dexterous, flexible-headed birds. Art by Corrine Cranor.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Meanwhile, we also project these vectors as ternary plots to get a general sense of orientation change. In general, you might see how many temporal muscle dots start at the top of the plot in Allosaurus and then plinko their way down along the RC (rostrocaudal) axis along the line to birds.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Meet our vector bouquets: orientations and magnitudes of jaw muscles projected as colored vectors and here plotted from a common origin on a single taxon, Dromaeosaurus, to show a phylogenetic change in muscle orientation.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

The supplementary info hosts a number of plates documenting the muscle attachment sites we used to model jaw muscles. The centroids of each of these surfaces were used to estimate orientation vectors while the we also used them to model volumes which were used in estimating muscle forces.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Accompanying our recent paper documenting evolutionary changes in jaw muscles along the line to birds, is a collection of models on Sketchfab illustrating 3D resultant vectors of jaw muscles along with skulls and a few different ways of visualizing data like these. (www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

sketchfab.com

Dinosaur Jaw Muscle Evolution - A 3D model collection by Holliday Lab (@holliday)

This collection shares 3D models of skulls and jaw muscle resultant vectors demonstrating phylogenetic changes in muscle orientation along the lines to modern birds. While temporal muscles shifted to ...

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Big ups to the group, particularly Alec Wilken and Kaleb Sellers for cooking up some simple yet elegant comparative approaches for exploring musculoskeletal biomechanics. Thanks to museum collections and colleagues for making specimens and their data available. Funding is thanks to #NSF.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Some birds use their protractor muscles to actively power cranial kinesis, but inferring this function in fossils is challenging. We compared 3D resultants of protractor muscles to orientations predicted palatal movement and found the muscles weren’t optimized for powering kinesis until Neognaths.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Compared to even their Cretaceous ancestors, living birds have fewer struts and linkages in their skulls, resulting in a higher potential for cranial kinesis, the ability of birds to move multiple joints in their skulls. Think about how a parrot can use its upper beak as an extra limb.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

We reviewed palatal morphologies across a variety of Mesozoic birds. Many changes the palate occurred, namely the breakdown of linkages between the quadrate, epipterygoid and braincase. Much of this change maybe be hidden in the developmental biology of the palatoquadrate cartilage.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

We figured out how to calculate 3D resultant vectors of jaw muscles in a modeled sample of living and extinct dinosaurs and found that a number of muscles change orientations and proportions as the brain got big and changed head shape during the origin of birds.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Happy to share this new paper! We explored the relationships of head shape and feeding mechanics in dinosaurs. A cascade of changes from big brains, to reoriented muscles, to a breakdown of linkages resulted in avian powered kinesis, but not until neognathes. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

pnas.org

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Movers and shakers in the lab: Chris, Aryan, Corrine, John, Cerise and whiteboard.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Catch my talk at #5thPVC! Thanks for the invite! Psst… it’s on croc heads.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Awesome, for funky socks Monday I will cease washing my intended socks now. Now to get those steps in!

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Lab had a great time at the Columbia Young Scientist Expo. Constant parade of families keen on discovery.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Hey folks!!! Come join us at Mizzou this October for a Paleo-Themed @anatomyorg.bsky.social Regional Meeting: PALEO CONNECTED. Sponsored in part by @paleosoc.bsky.social, we're looking forward to having you all. Watch this space.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

Who says birds don’t have teeth?

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

We’re cleaning some lab spaces to make way for impending construction. Found an entiantiornithine fossil high up on a shelf with some other skeletons. New taxon methinks.

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Reposted by Casey Holliday

Thom Sanger @thomsanger.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

SICB is back! Please follow the society's new BlueSky account: @sicb.bsky.social SICB recognizes that the scientific enterprise is only successful because of the people performing that science. Without those people, science and all of the political and economic strength that it provides, stops.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

Got to see the latest Squirrel-raptor at The Field Museum. Its exquisite preparation was done by Connie Van Beek and Akiko Shinya. Here’s Connie working on a more recent bird from the Green River Fm., a similar type of slab fossil, just ~90degrees of Eocene longitude away and ~90million yrs later.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

This was me in 1998 with Sue's exquisite left femur, side burns and hair! c/o Nat Geo. Her neck block is still in the jacket in the background.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Got to visit the Field Museum Friday. Got my picture with Geology Collections Manager Bill Simpson. Bill helped get me started in this grand adventure in Paleo. I’m forever grateful to him and all the rest of the Sue prep team, who still let me hang in the lab when I show up with my own students.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

Dad what have you done to me??? And why are you sharing it on your internet? :)

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Thom Sanger @thomsanger.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

I am very proud of the work that went into this new Sanger Lab publication. This paper was led by postdoc Marta Marchini and a number of my lab's undergraduate students, each of which contributed unique skills or effort to the completion of this project.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

Did you bring your dog? You didn’t really go to Lowe’s unless you brought your dog.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Meanwhile, also in anatomy research, the preponderance of studies on easily digitized endocasts and nets of landmarks blindly cast about them is basically reviving phrenology.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Nesting prints of different layers of tongue muscle architectures

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

3D print ready for painting over the holidays.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

3D fiber tracking of the various muscles that propel and retract the tongue. Its really quite simple, really.

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Getting hyped for #SICB2025. We'll have a talk and a poster on Pangolin tongues as part of the Hydrostats symposium. Get ready for a multimedia pangopalooza!

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Meet PhD student Chris Zobek, thanks to @nocturnetwork.bsky.social! Chris has been busy visualizing and measuring the diversity of jaw muscles in snakes. Really cool stuff. nocturnetwork.org/blog/nocturn...

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Casey Holliday @crocholliday.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

It’s half prepped with the left side still embedded in slab/matrix.

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