Thanks to in-kind donations of tens of thousands of rare books, scientific journals, and articles, and reports over the past two years, The University of Texas at Arlington’s Amphibian and Reptile Diversity Research Center (ARDRC) has become one of the largest publicly accessible herpetology libraries in the world.

Evolution has resulted in the development of both herbivores and carnivores – but how? What type of food did extinct vertebrates eat? And how can we gain insight into the diets of these creatures? In living animals, we can simply observe what they feed on today. In the case of extinct species, however, researchers rely on morphological or chemical information supplied by fossils. A team led by Professor Thomas Tütken of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has now compiled a reference framework of isotope compositions indicating the type of diet for extant reptiles that represents a useful reference dataset to reconstruct the diet of fossil reptiles.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine has gone in this seventeenth edition to Daniel Joshua Drucker (Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada), Joel Habener (Harvard University, United States), Jens Juul Holst (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) and Svetlana Mojsov (The Rockefeller University, United States) for fundamental biological discoveries that have driven the development of new generation drugs against diabetes and obesity.

Riley Galton, Ph.D., a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, has been awarded one of the most prestigious grants presented to early-career scientists. Galton, who is conducting her postdoctoral research in the lab of Stowers President and Chief Scientific Officer Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, Ph.D., is among the exceptional 25 new scientists joining the 2024 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Hanna H. Gray Fellows class.  

The cohort includes early career scientists working in research areas ranging from treatment-resistant cancers to how animals evolved to live on land.  The HHMI Hanna H. Gray Fellows Program provides each fellow with up to $1.5 million in support over the span of up to eight years.