iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I NEED to work but I'm feeling too burnt out to do everything I have to, so I'm considering starting up a new thing. I'm becoming something I always criticised

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Feeling terribly tired today. The cat woke me up at 4:30 in the morning, and the hangover from election results yesterday did not allow me back to sleep. My deadlines have loosened a bit, but I cannot just take some time off; I need to finish the course I'll be giving by the end of the month.

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Reposted by Gabriela Sobral

Brandon Peecook @gondwannabe.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Tenure-track job in vertebrate paleo! 🦬🦕🦈🦴 This is my former position at the Idaho Museum of Natural History & Biological Sciences. Can confirm that the collections are excellent & understudied; AND that the people at the IMNH and BioSci are wonderful colleagues. APPLY!

isu.csod.com

Curator/Assistant Professor, Idaho Museum of Natural History & Biological Sciences (3756)

Job DescriptionThe Idaho Museum of Natural History and the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University invite applications for a joint...

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I was around 5 when they introduced sport lessons in my school. They had judo and ballet, but when I went for the judo class, I was told I could not attend, that I'd have to go to ballet or none at all. I holded a grudge against dancing in general for many years, and only gave it a try when I was 22

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Sigh to people who don't read instructions or message history

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

It finally happened.... it may be the first time in my life... I replied all instead of the message author only 🤡

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The undergrad project I submitted was approved, and I just had amazing interviews with interested students. One of them was truly incredible and I think they will be excellent for this project :)

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Bom dia! Já ouviram nosso episódio sobre cobras e lagartos?? :D

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Esse episódio marca minha tentativa de retorno a um papel mais ativo na producao dos episódios. Pro futuro tenho ideia de alguns outros formatos e também de outros temas nesse formato roda de conversa de sempre. Inclusive, outro EP de cobras e lagartos mas sobre ecologia e ofidismo :)

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Daycare voted to continue on strike, just because I have two big deadlines coming up next month 😭 why my life seems to be always played on hard mode?

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Awesome, the file I started revieweing was corrupted and now I have to start over. Definitely not my day today....

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Child's daycare has been on strike for a week and I am about to miss a review deadline. Tried to contact the editor and just got the notification that I cannot reply to a reminder email. Now I am trying to find a way to ask for an extension. Thanks publishers for making our lives even more difficult

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Reposted by Gabriela Sobral

Ricardo J Pereira @biodiversitysmns.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

🪰🦗🪲 At SMNS, we draw on historical & monitoring collections to understand & conserve biodiversity at all its levels! 🌍 Join our inter-disciplinary team 🤝 in Stuttgart 🇩🇪 as Research Group Leader on Diptera 🪰, Hemiptera 🪵, or Orthoptera 🦗. 📌 tenure potential 🧬🔬 High-tech labs ⏰Apply by Oct 11 🔁share

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Sick child and strong PTM symptoms; I'm useless today

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

predatory journal publishing "research" stating that grinded spinosaurus tooth kills cancer cells in vitro. this immediately came to mind:

Single-frame cartoon from XKCD where a stick figure with a lab coat stands on a chair and points a gun to a petri dish on a table, where you can also see a binocular. It reads: "when you see a claim that a common drug or vitamin 'kills cancer cells in a petri dish,' keep in mind: so does a handgun"

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Reposted by Gabriela Sobral

Atila Iamarino @atila.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Tem um motivo porque insulina de uma mesma marca pode custar entre R$ 100 e 200 no Brasil e mais de $1000 nos EUA. Não é porque a empresa é legal aqui. É por que nossas leis dizem que tem que operar diferente. Ou fazem assim, ou não vendem aqui.

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

How awesome, I lost my museum access to Photoshop and Illustrator but Adobe Creative Cloud is still active in my computer, slowing it down

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

submission... I knew since then that this would be a tough process. My reply will be polite but I will make clear they have crossed a line and, if they insist, I will ask to be removed from the review process altogether. I do not have to take up with such a thing.

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

11:30 on a saturday evening and I am working because the author of a manuscript I am handling decided to make a fuss out of a request we made to them. I'm being accused of double standards and of delaying the process (it has not yet completed 3 months). This auhor has emailed us monthly since

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Thank you for accepting our invitation Roy! I hope to have the opportunity to work again with you in the future :)

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Reposted by Gabriela Sobral

Gabriel Ugueto @serpenillus.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Let me introduce you to Tametara mirim, a basal Cretaceous snake from South America that was likely fossorial. It is known from a beautifully preserved and articulated specimen that includes a skull! If you know anything about snake fossils you will know that is VERY rare #snakes #paleoart

Illustration showing Tametara burrowing while some Cretaceous birds and Sauropods stand in the background

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

I’ll take part on #FossilFriday today with a photo from our new fossil Tametara mirim, the tiny jewel from the Brazilian Cretaceous 😊

Fossil of articulated skull and anterior vertebrae representing the holotype of Tametara. Bones are whitish, matrix is beige-brown. The small 2cm scale bar is basically the size of the preserved region (posterior) of the skull

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Reposted by Gabriela Sobral

Agência FAPESP @agenciafapesp.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Estudo publicado em @nature.com mostra que a Tametara mirim vivia no subsolo, enquanto uma espécie contemporânea da Argentina vivia na superfície, indicando que já havia uma diversidade ecológica de #serpentes estabelecida 80 milhões de anos atrás. agencia.fapesp.br/58763

agencia.fapesp.br

Fóssil descoberto em São Paulo revela novas pistas sobre origem das cobras

Estudo publicado na revista <i>Nature</i> mostra que a <i>Tametara mirim</i> vivia no subsolo, enquanto uma espécie contemporânea da Argentina vivia na superfície; indicando que já havia uma diversida...

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Nossa pesquisa saiu também na Folha de São Paulo! Obrigada ao @reinaldojlopes.bsky.social pelo apoio! :)

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

It’s not wrong, though. It does not answer but shed light into directions we should be going in the future :)

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

If limb loss were bad, squamates wouldn’t have lost them a dozen times! :)

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Theoretically no single fossil is the direct ancestor of a group; by definition they will always be representatives of a lineage, not the ancestors themselves. Our job is to figure out to which extent they can help us reconstruct this putative ancestor.

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

This is exactly our point. Sometimes older fossils can infer on the origin of a clade if they maintain certain aspects reconstructed for their origin, and we showed that here it is not the case yet. Not with the new one nor with the other ones we already knew.

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Reposted by Gabriela Sobral

Tiago Simões @trsimoes.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Cool detailed account by @sobralg.bsky.social on some of the back stage stories behind our paper

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

I hope you enjoy our paper and that fossil snake ecology and evolution can be approached in new and exciting ways from now on! Again, if you haven't yet, read the full story here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Exceptional brain and ecological diversity in the earliest snakes - Nature

A well-preserved fossil snake from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil shows early ecological and brain shape disparity in the group.

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

better understand the origin of the snake brain, and perhaps, ecology. What is it that's hidden in their morphology that can elucidate the riddle? Also, it will be interesting to compare the brain of Tametara with that of some scolecophidians to answer remaining misteries. This may be coming next ;)

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Snakes are incredibly diverse and this is not recent, they were already by the Late Cretaceous! Another surprise is that no fossil known so far approaches our reconstructed morphospace for snake brain shape. Two are, though: Hydrophis and Micrurus. The next step would be to investigate these to

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

the path to "settle the debate" on the ecological origins of snakes, but the results were SO MUCH MORE exciting! It makes total sense that in the 50 My since snakes origin, they would have spread to such an enormous ecological diversity, but sometimes we focus too much and miss the obvious.

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

be deceiving, so we joined Nicolas and Simone for the 3D-GMM analysis and the results were unexpected, honestly. I mean, Tametara was confirmed as fossorial, but we were definitely not expecting such a disparity with other snakes and especially not with Dinilysia. I personally thought we were on

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

It was SO weird! From what I had been studying, such an elongate brain with a much reduced optic region was a big surprise. Not even living fossorial snakes have such a drastic morphology - not most of them at least. Apparently we were indeed looking at a very fossorial snake. But looks alone may

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Inner ear segmentation resulted in a very classic fossorial anatomy: thin semicircular canals, huge and globose vestibule... so little need for refined spatial proprioception and increased sensibility for low frequency sounds, respectively. When the brain endocast was ready, though, I was blown

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

I felt there was room for more. So Roy's paper on bone microstructure came to midn and I suggested to include this analysis. We had to expand the dataset, so I also did part of the data extraction for that too, and was delighted to learn that it confirmed our suspicions on fossoriality in Tametara

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

As segmentation went on, I kept asking "what is this bone doing here?!" repeatedly. Sure, snake briancases are very different from the basic reptilian pattern, but that seemed still strange as skull roof bones were overlapping like, a lot. We had discussed about where we wanted to take the study but

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

This sounded fun but also a bit scary I must confess, as I knew close to 0 on snake braincases at that point. Scans were not great, but doable. I asked if there was a need to rush and the reply was "take your time". Music to my ears, so I indeed to the time to learn deeply about snake braincases

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

One afternoon I was pretty upset with my own project because I was trying to segment a fossil for two years on that point and every single trial was failing. Then I got a message from Tiago. - are you busy? - I wish - wanna board a new project? - yeah sure! - great! - ahmm.. on what? - a new snake

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Gabriela Sobral @sobralg.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

So, I will take the opportunity to write about our paper on the new fossil snake 🐍 from Brazil out in @nature.com today. Tiago wrote on the science itself here 👇 so I will tell a bit about the behind the scene stages, especially segmentation and anatomical interpretation bsky.app/profile/trsi...

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