Look at this group🥳🤩 Marine reptiles are lucky.

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4/4 Most importantly, perhaps: invite outside expertise in. Turtles have much more to contribute to evolutionary biology than turtle specialists alone can extract from them. Thanks @tweetisaurus.bsky.social & @imranrahman.bsky.social for review invitation & @stephanspiekman.bsky.social for editing.

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3/4 But methodological sophistication cannot compensate for missing anatomy/fossils. So our agenda starts with specimens: CT scanning, collection revision, targeted fieldwork & genuinely open 3D data are cornerstones of turtle systematics.

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2/4 🐢-palaeo has an exceptional fossil record & increasingly rich anatomical datasets. Are we making the most of them? We argue for a broader methods toolkit: total-evidence, Bayesian & time-calibrated approaches, explicit comparison among methods, while retaining parsimony as part of toolkit.

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1/4 🐢 What should fossil turtle systematics look like ten years from now? Walter Joyce & I offer our personal answer in a new review paper: "Transforming Turtle Systematics: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Path Ahead" Out now in @journalsystpal.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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