Australian automotive workers and community leaders interview dataset following 2017 assembly plant closures.

The Australian manufacturing sector saw the exit of the automotive industry in 2017 arising in mass retrenchment across its assembly plants and supply chain firms. In 2019, a large-scale program of research was launched to investigate the impacts of the closures on workers and community including a dedicated stream of qualitative work which took place in 2021. This work took the form of in-depth interviews that investigated the experiences of automotive workers as they underwent retrenchment, reskilling, re-employment and retirement.

Evolutionary origin of the feather epidermis.

The formation of scales and feathers in reptiles and birds has fascinated biologists for decades. How might the developmental processes involved in the evolution of the amniote ectoderm be interpreted to shed light on the evolution of integumental appendages? An Evo-Devo approach to this question is proving essential to understand the observation that there is homology between the transient embryonic layers covering the scale epidermis of alligators and birds and the epidermal cell populations of embryonic feather filaments. Whereas the embryonic layers of scutate scales are sloughed off at hatching, that their homologues persist in feathers demonstrates that the predecessors of birds took advantage of the ability of their ectoderm to generate embryonic layers by recruiting them to make the epidermis of the embryonic feather filament.

Origin of archosaurian integumentary appendages: the bristles of the wild turkey beard express feather-type beta keratins.

The discovery that structurally unique "filamentous integumentary appendages" are associated with several different non-avian dinosaurs continues to stimulate the development of models to explain the evolutionary origin of feathers. Taking the phylogenetic relationships of the non-avian dinosaurs into consideration, some models propose that the "filamentous integumentary appendages" represent intermediate stages in the sequential evolution of feathers. Here we present observations on a unique integumentary structure, the bristle of the wild turkey beard, and suggest that this non-feather appendage provides another explanation for some of the "filamentous integumentary appendages.