ITS OUT!✨

WE DISCOVERED A NEW WAY TO IMAGE FOSSIL CELL SPACES!

Yes, that spinning cell space is 400 mill-years-old, also turns out fossil fish gave us bone metabolism!

PhD chapter 1 is out:bit.ly/2PoUY3J

If you share ANY of my stuff on this site, share THIS THREAD!
This is my first ALL FISH paper.. what have I become?!

For the quick land well written lowdown check out the @Natgeo article by @Laelaps with bomb art by @BrianEngh_Art: nationalgeographic.com/science/articl…

For the continued ramblings of an overly excited scientist READ ON!
Again the paper can be found here @ScienceAdvances: advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/14/e…
OKAY lets get into it. My goal here is that you don't have to read the paper if you get through this.

So I don't know if you noticed but I think bones are interesting. Duh.

But whats even more interesting is what its made of!
The cells and the minerals.
I WANT TO UNDERSTAND OLD CELLS

First lets get a hold of what cells we'll be talking about.

Bone is made up by a few kinds of cells but we will focus on the BEST KIND. Osteocytes the ones that LIVE in the bone. They live in these caves called lacunae.

Art by: Dave Mazierski
So in fossils these cells don't survive. But their caves, their lacunae do! The lacunae are like a perfect mold of what the cell would look like.

In fact these lacunae are so perfect that we can use them to estimate genome size!
Palaeontologists usually use histology, SEM or more recently Micro-CT to image these cells.

And for a long time this served us well. But I needed more detail, the questions I had concerned how these cells talk to one another.
Histology wasn't working for me because its a complex 3D system and 2D wasn't going to cut it.

and CT scanning often gave me images that looked like this. Which is fine if you want to only count cells.
At this point I was sweating my PhD relied on this, but maybe we didn't have the technology yet

This same week I visited the @HZBde for an unrelated project and saw a poster one of our collaborators had. It had amazing images of a method I had never seen. It looked like cells..
The images were of battery corrosion tests ( like the ones below) My collaborators are amazing material scientists, and listened to me ramble and freak out alot so they didn't get what my excitement was about.
I asked them what scale this was at, and what they needed to run this.

I got an answer like "well it can't have too much water in it and has to be stable and not blow up please" I said hey.. fossils are pretty damn stable.

CAN WE TRY IT PRETTY PLLLEASE?!
They said yes. I held my breath.

They zapped my fossil. So this method uses an Ion beam and an SEM in unison where the ion beam shaves off some fossil, and the SEM scans the surface, and basically it is serial sectioning the fossil at a CELLULAR SCALE.
My AMAZING Co-first author Markus Osenberg sent me some images a few months later.

I straight up didn't believe him. I thought he made them in blender. I called him up and was like. wut. WHAT?!
HOW IT STARTED HOW ITS GOING
Okay okay.. so now we know we can do this.

THESE CELLS ARE REAL.

What can we do with this new toy?
Well turns out I didn't get to really make this choice, the first cells we got had a halo around them.

An intriguing halo. labeled here as "area of low density"
I FREAKED OUT.

this doesn't look like much, but know when you study a specific thing and it shows up on the test. SAME FEELING.

I had seen this before. IN HUMANS!!?
This is evidence of a process called

✨OSTEOCYTIC OSTEOLYSIS✨

A process where these cells dissolve the bone around them to release it back into the blood stream. this is how we humans and many other vertebrates regulate our mineral levels.
PLEASE SEE FULL SCREEN.

SO!!!!! we could see evidence of this process in fossil cells spaces. Here is the kicker: we were zapping the earliest vertebrates with bone cells. Early armoured fish.

This means this type of metabolism is ANCIENT!
The specimen we sampled was from a group of early armoured fish, they were the first that we know of to have osteocytes. Everything before had bones with not cells in them. SO WHY EVOLVE OSTEOCYTES?!
It is thought that maybe Osteocytes evolved because these fish needed more minerals accessible in a more efficient fashion.

This is not my hypothesis it has been floated my times before, and even recently by @DonaldDavesne! BUT NOW WE HAVE EVIDENCE!
TLDR;
1- New study applies new tech to give the best images of fossil cell spaces
2- also discovers earliest osteocytes could metabolize bone like modern ones do.

But please read we worked so hard 🤓🥺
So there is a lot more in this paper, like we applied machine learning to segment the cells.

We also applied network analyses to figure out which cells are talking to which! Here we see that some cells (in red) are more central to local connections than others.
We also figured out that at least in our placoderm sample the osteocytes branch about the same number of times as human osteocytes do!

But this is all preliminary as this is a sample of one.
THERE IS SO MUCH MORE TO SAY.. but I said it all in the paper.. its short and its OPEN ACCESS SO GO READ IT PLEASE!

advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/14/e…
Finally Ill leave you with
1-My co-authors are awesome! ALL OF THEM made this possible. There was much SciComm between the paleo and non-paleos This was truly an interdisciplinary effort. So I guess what Im trying to say is keep preaching fossils to your non-paleo colleagues.
2- I cannot wait to see how this will be applied to
-Fossil embryos
-Fossil teeth
-Invert fossils
-Plant structures
-Fossil feathers

AND THINGS I CAN'T EVEN THINK OF!

IM SO EXCITED TO HAND THIS TOOL OVER TO PALEO!
P.S.
From her on out placoderms are known as #BeetleMermaids. Not up for debate.

Art:@BrianEngh_Art

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More from @Yara_Haridy

Jun 3, 2022
I use twitter to talk science, fossils, and scream about bones.

So why am I terrified to share this? This too is an unfortunate part of science...

Two years ago @Koskinonodon and I reported our advisor, Robert Reisz, for bullying and harassment.
tinyurl.com/4hm42zr8
The letter above is to our paleontological community. Really to all scientists, this is a major problem in the system. Giving power and applying pressure, in the name of meritocracy.

It broke me several times.
It is not a few bad apples, its flawed by design.
In this thread I will talk about my personal experience.
So obviously, Content warning // Sexual harassment and bullying.

I hate that THIS will be my longest twitter thread.
Read 35 tweets
May 12, 2022
🧬Time for some #CatScience!🧬

Siamese #Cats are born white and gain their colour through their life!

It’s based on.. wait for it TEMPERATURE 🥶 ❄️

Siamese cats are temperature dependent albinos! A.K.A a live kitty heat map!

A thread featuring my cats🧵 👇🏽 Siamese cat sitting on a wi...
New born Siamese Cats are almost completely white!

I’ll keep the genetics simple here so stay with me. Siamese cats have a specific gene that blocks colour 🛑

BUT the enzyme made by this gene only works at a certain temperature. ~101F (38-39.2 C) a cats body temperature! Image
The womb is pretty warm. Kittens come out white, but as they cool the colour blocking begins to stop working. Staring with the extremities!

Look at their little noses and ears they get dark first because they are the coolest part of their body.

Friggin adorable. Siamese kitten with a dark ...
Read 7 tweets
Aug 10, 2021
✨ Day 1 of #BoneFacts

Bone is a living tissue bone is NOT dry bone is WET. WAB.

So how come you need lubricants when you need a bone saw, or what does it mean to be “bone-dry”

This is the bone wetness thread no one asked for! 💁🏽‍♀️ 🦴 ☔️
Okay so what’s the deal? You’ve seen bones on display maybe even found a couple and they didn’t strike you as particularly moist.

But trust me bone is WET💦

The water content of bone varies from 12-31% depending what bone, what animal and how old it is.
This is because bones have marrow, cells, nerves and blood vessels. All of those are components that make the ‘bone organ’.

Bones do SO MUCH more than support us, but that’s for another day’s #BoneFacts!
Read 9 tweets
Apr 15, 2021
Worth a read. I am not going to speak for Mexicans but I can only imagine the frustration.

You don’t have to take a fossil out of the country to make it inaccessible to its people. This is shady af and that the journal is backing them up says it all.

sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/a…
As an Egyptian I know what it’s like to have parts of your heritage taken out and then only a fraction of your family can see them.
Don’t tell me they are safer elsewhere.

A- that’s racist
B- spinosaurus 🙃
Read 4 tweets
Mar 22, 2021
STORY TIME!

Many of you may have read the @nytimes article by @asher_elbein: nyti.ms/3caRvyn

Some of you may want more context as to how "normal" paleo fieldwork became a collapsing museum rescue mission AND case study in how to #DecolonizePaleontology

📸:Mariem Hbaieb
First, I'd like to shout out @nytimes and @asher_elbein for giving us a public platform for this.

This article has been in the works since January 2020!!

Also check out quotes from @emmadnn and @mauritiantales. These are THE people to follow!

nytimes.com/2021/03/22/sci…
The fact that it seems to coincide with certain ethically dubious fossils being published recently is a coincidence but also emphasizes how often this happens.

#DecolonizePaleontology
Read 25 tweets
Jun 30, 2020
OH HEY THERE I’m Yara the Osteological Oligarch, and my face just got distributed across Berlin!!

So let me tell you a little about my PhD research on bone evolution (and bonus fossil virus evidence) in English! 🦠 🦴 💀 ✨

#Osteology #SciComm
Seriously tho..
MOM LOOK IM CENTERFOLD!!

My mother can’t read german.. I can’t read german.

It’s titled “the time traveler”.. either millions of years back or a year forward are my options tbh

But if you CAN read german here is the link: museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/sites/default/…
Ahem.
So I tweet about all kinds of natur-y things, many of you might wonder whats she actually study?

Right now, B O N E S🦴

While this was mostly for the 📸 I DO rely heavily on mammals for my research because humans and mice have been studied the most on a bone-cell level!
Read 11 tweets

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