Yale EEB Prof. Martha Muñoz presenting at the World Economic Forum! www.weforum.org/meetings/sus...

Pretty stellar "I have a great job" moment... www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1fZ...

Very important paper and resource. Bryophyte genomes expanded by one order of magnitude. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Check out our new preprint! We compare sequence versus synteny approaches for resolving a challenging #phylogenetic problem. In this case, synteny is far more informative! Also includes the first chromosome-level #genome for the enigmatic #fish family Gyrinocheilidae. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

I almost starting whooping and hollering during weekly departmental seminar...great talk but I was following the game on my phone!

🌹Congratulations to Oluwatobi Oso of Yale University, winner of the 2025 Donald R. Kaplan Dissertation Award in Comparative Morphology. Honorable mention: Christopher Joaquín Muñoz (The University of Texas at El Paso). botany.org/home/awards/... #BSA2025AwardsBlitz #IamaBotanist

Very proud of this extremely collaborative piece: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... Here, we show that divergence in visual systems - in response to differences in the light environment - leads to rapid divergence in sexually selected colour traits. Work brilliantly led by Madeleine Carruthers. 🐟👀🎨

Do you like cichlids? Fossils? Fossil cichlids? Would you like to study them as part of a graduate degree at the University of Michigan, joining an NSF-funded project? Get in touch.

Hybridization and introgression are major evolutionary processes. Since the 1940s, the prevailing view has been that they shape plants far more than animals. In our new study (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... ), we find the opposite: animals exchange genes more, and for longer, than plants

The bumpy snailfish, discovered 10,000 feet down off the coast of California, shows that not all denizens of the abyss are frightening. (I watched the video more than 10 times.) My latest for @nytimes.com (gift link!) #marinelife www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/s...

Why are some species widespread while others are found only in small, isolated areas? A study in Nature Communications shows that species with narrow ranges, and thus higher extinction risk, are often island-restricted, poor dispersers, and have evolved relatively recently. #evosky 🧪

Human-driven extinction event not yet the "sixth mass extinction", but is very likely the largest extinction event of the last 66 million yrs. 🌏 🧪 Read about it in our new paper led by @jackhhatfield.bsky.social and Katie Davis @anthropocenebio.bsky.social doi.org/10.1111/gcb....

New species alert! A Pascua goby from the Coral Sea. This genus now contains four species. Two from the Eastern Pacific and two from Australia, with more than 5,500km separating them. Lots of fun describing my second new species. #TeamFish #Fish doi.org/10.3390/fish...

Look at this crazy thing! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Colleague Bud Freeman on GPB talking about new species of bass www.gpb.org/news/2025/09...

Excited to announce that the 1st paper from my postdoc is now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social ! Using a large dataset of 3D preserved fossils, we explore the diversification of jaws in early bony fishes. 1/15 www.cell.com/current-biol...

YaleNews coverage on our study of how North American cavefishes lost their eyes...we wanted to channel Kipling's Just So Stories (1902), but the science was good enough! @chasedbrownstein.bsky.social‬ www.nearlab.org news.yale.edu/2025/08/27/d...

@chasedbrownstein.bsky.social @tjnear.bsky.social et al. reveal that amblyopsid fishes colonized caves at least four times from ancestors adapted to low-light environments, and use genomic data to infer ages of subterranean ecosystems in N. America. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf185 #evobio #molbio

Happy Academic New Year! Near Lab website updated with our newest members! www.nearlab.org

Ji, Kapli, Flouri & @zihengyang.bsky.social assess the impact of genotyping errors in phylogenomic data on Bayesian inference of species trees, suggesting that it is better to sequence a few samples at high depths over many samples at low depths. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf184 #evobio #molbio

Aren't they lovely? Congratulations to my great colleague Bud Freeman, this is the culmination of over a decade of work! www.mapress.com/zt/article/v...

A great read on UChicago, arguing we’re seeing the result of decades of mismanagement: “The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal.”

When federal environmental justice initiatives vanished, Carletta Davis launched a campaign for mayor to continue the fight.

Very proud of this work...allowed the establishment of an international team of collaborators. Another contribution by Chase Brownstein!

1/16 🚨🚨 New paper!! I am thrilled to share our study that uses fossils, genomes, and a bit of geology to investigate how many times cavefishes evolved, and how they can help us figure out the ages of caves themselves! Link: academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

Checking genbank for an obscure clade

What a fantastic new paper out today in @pnas.org: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... - and what a great resource, summarising the climatic niche of primates and tackling the hypothesis on whether primates evolved in warm tropical forests 😍

This is a wonderful opportunity. UT EEB has excellent faculty and thriving in a collegial environment.

It's good they did not do this!

Arrived today...excited to read this before the story is made into a film or Netflix series!

This is hilarious!

I have been away from home all summer, which means away from my desk and my watercolors. It’s so good to take a break, but I am itching to get back to painting! It’s like a fundamental need. Taking the long flight home tomorrow, I’ll see you soon, wall ‘o fish!

New palaeo-PhD opportunity! Will you be the one to figure out the anatomy and function of fossil jawless fish? Come join the team! Application Deadline August 22nd, funding for UK student only (sorry) www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

The quickest turnaround from publication to the work being profiled in a textbook...a law school textbook, but a textbook nonetheless! Snail Darter, RIP

5 big unanswered questions about the origin of life It's 2025, and Earth is still the only example we have of a planet inhabited by life. Here are 5 big questions we're seeking to answer about how it came to be, as well as finding life elsewhere. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #life #astro

Advances in computational methods for inferring networks from #genome-scale data and guidelines for deriving biological insights from #phylogenetic networks www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Mount Holyoke College in lovely western Massachusetts is hiring a tenure-track neuroscientist. Amazing students and fantastic faculty support - please share! mtholyoke.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

I'm thrilled to share more cool fish genetics, led by former MSc student Amanda Meuser, and with former student Amy Pitura and collaborator @erynmcfarlane.bsky.social. This one is about minnow hybrids! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Good news! Science-based species delimitation (from the 1800s) and evidence-based conservation leads to the delisting of the majestic Percina rex THE KING!...aka Roanoke Logperch www.fws.gov/press-releas...

In 2007 Larry Page and I described Percina williamsi that is now protected as Threatened by the ESA. Having been cited only 13 times this paper will never likely contribute to my h-index, but it remains one of my favorites. Photo by Caleb Moses.

Xing et al. study sex chromosome evolution in two species of halfbeak fish, identifying a large sex-linked ZW region in Hyporhamphus sajori and a small sex-linked region on a different chromosome, with male heterogamety, in H. intermedius. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf151 #evobio #molbio

“GenBank and other federal repositories fuel curiosity-based science. They are public libraries of vast amounts of information that allow scientists to perform research without needing large grants. They’re invaluable to improving our understanding of the world.” news.yale.edu/2025/07/11/b...

Check out our new paper! We find cavefish colonized caves 3x and global cooling events may have influenced these events. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Another news story about imperiled darter species impacted by a proposed mega data center, including a new species described in April 2025 by our research group. insideclimatenews.org/news/1407202...

Field work in Cape Cod!

The first Muñoz-Near lab collaboration to make YaleNews! news.yale.edu/2025/07/11/b...

Sheila Rodriguez Machado talking on "Areas of Endemism in the Greater Antilles: The Fish Side of the Story" #JMIH25

This is Pogonophryne barsukovi, the stubbeard plunderfish. Such a great name. They live in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, and they have a pretty great dorsal fin. #sciart #teamfish

Need to predict an unknown trait, like body size, for extinct species? Use phylogenies! A new paper by colleagues from the ‪@uniofreading.bsky.social‬ and Montana State demonstrates that phylogenetic prediction is more accurate than regression formulae. doi.org/10.1038/s414...