Happy “liberal arts professor helps save the Union” day to all who celebrate

Really excited to share that Chris Martinez & my paper on ecological, functional, & evolutionary diversity produced by novel jaw joints in fishes is out [email protected]! We show how modulation of these new joints can produce a wide range of functional opportunities doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Back from a great visit to Cleveland for #Evol2026. #NearLab graduate students each gave an excellent talk...and I joined in for the fun and learning!

New paper out today! @sternarchella.bsky.social and I review how modularity and integration influence adaptive radiations and diversification. Read it here: rdcu.be/fpcSX

Clarivate Journal Citation Reports are out for 2026, which reviews citations during 2023-2025. The Yale Peabody Museum journal Bulletin of the Peabody Museum of Natural History has an impact factor of 8.1! Comparatively Syst Biol is 6.2, Evolution is 3.0, and American Naturalist is 2.7.

Please join me next Tuesday at 3:15 PM (Room 21) at #Evol2026 to learn about the complex history of complex trait loss, extinction, and evolutionary radiation in extreme ecosystems in a clade of thousands of fishes!

🧵 New paper! We’re excited to release OPTICS: software that immediately predicts color sensitivity from any opsin protein sequence. In other words: give OPTICS any opsin sequence, and it predicts the wavelength of light the pigment is most sensitive to 🌈👁️ academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

New preprint from the #NearLab w/@chasedbrownstein.bsky.social The costs of paraphyletic classification in the world's most endangered fishes zenodo.org/records/2063...

Last week the lab had a reason to celebrate as Julia Laterza successfully defended her PhD dissertation. Congratulations, Doctor Julia Laterza! Your dedication, perseverance, and hard work have led to this remarkable achievement, and we are excited to see what comes next!! 🐸

Led by the incomparable Sanaa El-Sayed, a study out today in Science Advances throws open an important new window on marine fish diversity during the critical few million years following the K-Pg mass extinction. Below: artistic vision of the new fauna by Ian Baylatry.

Ossoff: This is what small men like Trump, Vance and Miller will never understand. Our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but through our ideas. Americans are a people united not by ethnicity, but by our shared convictions. That is what makes us exceptional.

Happy Pride 🌈

BREAKING: Mayor Mamdani just signed an “executive order” to repeal bedtime so NYC kids can watch the Knicks play in the NBA Finals!

Ok, this is cool... Treemble: A graphical tool to generate Newick strings from phylogenetic tree images🧪 academic.oup.com/bioinformati... Treemble is a native desktop application for macOS and Windows and is freely available, with documentation, at treemble.org.

Subterranean allopatric speciation... news.yale.edu/2026/05/21/u...

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