New species alert! 🐟 Meet Typhlichthys styx the Phantom Cavefish, a new amblyopsid cavefish from TN, AL & GA! Ancient aquifer geology drove allopatric speciation ~8 Ma ago! shorturl.at/XWwYv

Julia Wood and I made it to the wonderful Fish of the Week podcast! Hear us talk about our new species descriptions from the Gilt Darter (Percina evides) complex. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/g...

I love and respect this scientist. Carl Sagan answers a question about creation vs evolution.

📄New paper out in Earth-Science Reviews! ⏱️Ammonites are essential to calibrate the #Jurassic rocks. We review the chronostratigraphic data from key outcrops worldwide placing the Iberian sections as essential benchmarks for the Sinemurian-Pliensbachian transition 🔓 doi.org/10.1016/j.ea...

Excited to share this new pre-print from the fantastic @kelsiehunnicutt.bsky.social! Kelsie put together a thoughtful and thorough review on hybridization in animal evolution: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v.... She tracks notable shifts in perspectives on the study of hybridization through time.

Smithsonian Fish Curator position announcement! Note the application dates of May 12 – June 2, 2026. Should be posted here tomorrow: trustcareers.si.edu#js-careers-j...

There are two higher ed Bluskies right now:

IQ-TREE 3: Phylogenomic Inference Software using Complex Evolutionary Models academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Ray-finned fishes are famously diverse, but we know little about their brains or cranial endocasts. @rodrigoichthys.bsky.social opens this black box with a dice-CT survey of 86 species across the actinopt tree of life. #OA in @royalsocietypublishing.org 🐟🧠 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Systematic Biology's May issue is hot off the presses. This one has Title et al's 75th Anniversary paper on lineage diversification, new software for studying duplication and loss histories from Parsons and Bansal, and many more. academic.oup.com/sysbio/issue... @systbiol.bsky.social

Peter Raven, RIP

🐟 CALL FOR ABSTRACTS 🐟 Abstract submission for Cichlid Science 2026 is open until May 31st - spread the word! We look forward to welcoming you to Antwerp!

New from the Near Lab, Chase Brownstein takes the lead documenting the geographic distribution of the imperiled Birmingham Darter (Etheostoma birminghamense), described in April 2025 in an effort led by Chase. Much of this study is from observations made during October 2025. shorturl.at/Pd4iU

New from the Near Lab. Grad student Julia Wood takes the lead on the description of four beautiful new species of darters! shorturl.at/ncY79

Two science fair winners? No. Two good friends inducted into the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society! @paulturnerlab.bsky.social gsas.yale.edu/edward-alexa...

The next generation of ichthyologists is strong! @anoplogaster.bsky.social

Finally making it to teleosts in my rebooted ichthyology course!

Paraphyletic sharks www.sciencefocus.com/news/sharks-...

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us

Wow! Sawfish alert

Time to update my BIOL 1040 Principles of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology lecture notes!

Chase Brownstein's shark paper covered in Nature News!

New slide for upcoming lecture in my ichthyology course...filer feeding in sharks and rays is amazing and has at least four origins. Looking for something to add to the big white space in the upper right quadrant of the slide. Suggestions?

Alas, poor ostracoderms!

FYI #AncientSky - the upcoming release of Caitlin C. Gillespie's "Women and Resistance in the "Annals" of Tacitus" is happening soon. And, it can be on your bookshelf, if you do not resist your excitement and head to the @cornellupress.bsky.social site: www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

Honored that #NearLab work on fish phylogenetics is recognized with this award, in particular our work on Black Basses (Micropterus) that includes the famous Largemouth Bass

New from the #NearLab, Chase Brownstein chasedbrownstein.bsky.social takes the lead on Phylogenomics and the origins of sharks. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Acanthomorph teleosts (spiny-rayed fishes) comprise nearly one third of all living species of vertebrates. This important study describes a new fossil taxa that pushes the group back 20 million years in the geologic record! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A very interesting and well-executed study. royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

For almost two decades, scientists have debated whether sponges or comb jellies are the first animal lineage. A feature in Nature describes how some researchers are calling for a more harmonious approach. #evosky 🧪

From 1,750–2,000 m deep, we collected one of the rarest deepsea fishes out there: a one-jaw eel (family Monognathidae). Only ~100 specimens of this group are known worldwide and we hold the largest collection (~46), most just a few inches long… The one we collected though, 6 inches or 154 mm!

New paper story time. 👁️🐟🦴🩻 Here is your gormless jawless relative Jamoytius: [1/8]

Barua, @marcrr.ecoevo.social.ap.brid.gy et al. searched for convergent substitutions in teleost fishes, detecting convergence in 89 protein-coding gene families across 143 genomes. Functional experiments support functional roles of convergent genes. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag015 #evobio #molbio

My first microscope! www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

New paper describing a replicated movement study aimed at understanding movement across culverts in Louisiana. Fish movement is hard. doi.org/10.1002/rra.70017 #fish #ecology #movement #culvert

Starting off 2026 the right way, new from the #NearLab w/dartersdanjmac.weebly.com taking the lead on genomic and phenotypic species delimitation in North American endemic darters

How have mountain building and climate change shaped alpine biodiversity over millions of years? Check out our new study in Science Advances! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A postdoc in my lab, Ben Flanagan, just had a really nice paper come out in MB&E @official-smbe.bsky.social comparing transcriptomic response to a standardized immune challenge in 14 phylogenetically diverse species of ray-finned fishes academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

Great news article about the Tulane University Biodiversity Research Institute's Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection and our recent accessions of specimens from the DEEPEND Consortium and the University of Louisiana at Monroe.

Huge congrats to my mentee @pfschwarz.bsky.social on her first first-author paper! Three-way secondary contact and mosaic hybridization in darters. Plus a bonus comparison of ddRAD vs lcWGS. @fishgenomes.bsky.social @tjnear.bsky.social #fish #evolution #genomics doi.org/10.1093/evol...

I am very excited to share our new paper with my amazing co-authors and mentors @dmacguig.bsky.social @fishgenomes.bsky.social @tjnear.bsky.social . We investigate a secondary contact zone in #darters. track.smtpsendmail.com/9032119/c?p=...

Here are just a few of the many fish I painted this year (not to scale). It's fun to stick a bunch of them together into a collage and see some of the incredible diversity of body shape and color patterns. Merry Fishmas! 🐡🐟🐠

New from #NearLab The role of ecology in allopatric speciation of darters in the Central Highlands, USA shorturl.at/YEmxH

New paper out now! We show that innovations can have varied effects on a phenotypic evolution, determined by the interaction between external ecological context and internal changes to organismal structure. Read here: royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

New paper! Here we look at shape evolution of the mandible in Pelagiaria, a group of open-ocean fishes that includes tuna and mackerel. We find that shape disparity accumulated rapidly at the origin of the clade at around the K/Pg boundary... academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...

Female deep-sea anglerfish...final answer! yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/12...

Congratulations to UMMP Associate Research Scientist Miriam Zelditch on the release of the third edition of the indispensable "Geometric Morphometrics for Biologists" (a.k.a. the green book)! #FossilFriday

Wonderful new review of The Tree of Life in Science by Yan Wong. "This mix of the uncertainty of research, the excitement of new discovery, and the importance of solving “science’s greatest puzzle” is what makes the book such a delight" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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