What he said ⬇️ 🎯

Max Telford's 1993 paper with Peter Holland on the phylogenetic affinities of chaetognaths was a big inspiration as I began my work on the phylogenetics of Acanthocephala. Telford has written a book and the preview looks amazing.

The Fudge Lab at Chapman University is recruiting a postdoc for an NSF-funded project on the biophysics of hagfish defensive slime deployment. Please repost! Apply here: tinyurl.com/4p937dn5

Song et al. have constructed the 464-way whole genome alignment of teleosts, a resource that constitutes the first of its kind for fishes and brings the scope of genomic study for this group on par with other vertebrate lineages. doi.org/10.1016/j.xi... #FISH10k #teleosts #Genomics #phylogeny

1/4 I typically do not use preprint services, but our findings are important to the residents of Bessemer, Alabama impacted by the Marvel Project...a mega datacenter that will have a huge environmental impact. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Incredible and moving exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art on the art and poetry of William Blake. Runs through November 30, 2025 britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions-...

Our new open-access book has been published today. Please download and share www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

The November cover of Genome Biology and Evolution features @raularayadonoso.bsky.social @kenrokusumi.bsky.social @anthonygeneva.bsky.social et al., who studied how structural rearrangements and selection promote phenotypic evolution in Anolis. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf196 #genome #evolution

1/5 New from the #NearLab, w/Julia Wood in the lead, Pleistocene speciation and glacial refugia in the Gilt Darter (Percidae: Percina evides) species complex academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

Student life work at Yale! yaleims.com

New phylogeny and family-level classification of Stomiiformes (viperfishes, hatchetfishes, bristlemouths) bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Now out in Tim Smithson's Festschrift: neurocranial anatomy (incl. endocast) of the Early Devonian Durialepis et al. OA for your porolepiform pondering pleasure. W/ @gilespalaeo.bsky.social @jorgemondejar.bsky.social @tom-challands.bsky.social & S. Henderson www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The Birmingham Dater (Etheostoma birminghamense) was described in April, 2025. It has a tiny distribution in the Valley Creek system in Alabama Here is a 20 minute film about the datacenter. I am interviewed in the film and the new species is profiled www.southernexposurefilms.org/films/hypers...

New from the Near Lab "Phylogenetic Taxonomy of Wrasses and Parrotfishes (Labridae)" open access bioone.org/journals/bul...

Now available in Systematic Biology, a new paper (and R package) in which we outline an approach to account for non-independence in comparative analyses of lineage-pair traits academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

Excited to share this work, out today in MBE! In polar fishes, we found that antifreeze protein genes expanded in copy number at low temperatures and contracted in the deep sea, highlighting a role of depth and pressure in AFP evolution. 🔗 academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Stop on by if you are in Knoxville!

New preprint led by grad student, Yu Mo! We introduce new software to calculate evolutionary rates of quantitative characters in the presence of discordance 1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Biodiversity, Systematics, and Taxonomy of Ostariophysi (Osteichthyes, Actinopterygii): What We Know Today After Three Decades of Integration of Morphological and Molecular Data.🐟🧪 mdpi.com/2673-6500/5/...

🚨We're hiring! The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is seeking a tenure-track split position as Assistant Curator of Ichthyology and Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences. Please retweet & share with colleagues! 🐟🐠🧪 Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/174674

Another fish gig!

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.