Congratulations to our 2026-2027 CoEvoD Fellows! 🧬 Claire Cheng, bacterial DNA methylation (Behringer). Joshua Eis, how birds evolved long lifespans (Castiglione). Mia Elbon, human aging and life history, (Herculano-Houzel) Three fellows. Three labs. One mission. #Evolution

Yucca moths and yuccas cannot survive without each other. But Vanderbilt's Olle Pellmyr discovered cheater moths hiding inside that ancient partnership — and the yuccas had already evolved a way to keep them in check. #Coevolution at its most elegant. 🌵 #TBT #Science

🐙 An octopus has 3 hearts and blue blood. But the wildest part? 2/3 of its neurons are in its arms, not its head. Each arm has its own nerve cluster that can make decisions independently. The central brain does not micromanage. It delegates. #Evolution

📖 Our Spring 2026 magazine is out! This issue has everything: a Nashville ice storm and what it means for climate science, graduate students proving math with bacteria, AI designing antibodies against bird flu, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for one of our own.

In the 1940s, Max Delbruck was at Vandy asking how viruses replicate and pass on genetic information. His work on bacteriophages laid the foundation for molecular biology. He won the Nobel Prize for his VU work in 1969. #ThrowbackThursday #Vanderbilt

A gut pathogen does not just survive inflammation. It engineers it. New research from the Zhu Lab in Cell reveals how toxin-producing Bacteroides fragilis rewires host metabolism to create a more oxygenated environment then thrives in it. Big implications for colorectal cancer 🧬

Antarctic icefish #evolved mutations in their vision protein that simultaneously change how they absorb light AND how fast they reset after seeing it. A dual adaptation to one of Earth's most extreme visual environments. Research from Vanderbilt's Castiglione Lab. 🧬

Did you know that sharks have been ruling the seas longer than trees have been around? 🌊🦈 While the oldest known tree, Wattieza, is ~385MY old, sharks have been cruising for ~450MY! That’s 65MY of fin-tastic supremacy before trees even started shading! #Evolution

Mark your calendars, Nashville! 🎉 November 5 ESI is hosting a Biodiversity Day at @adventuresci — faculty booths, fossils, and a talk by @Jaap_de_Roode on animal self-medication. 🐝🦋 Registration link coming soon! #BiodiversityDay #Evolution

Before anyone had a personal computer, Nils Baricelli was at Vanderbilt simulating evolution on punch cards. His colleagues thought it was strange. History has been kinder. Some ideas are just too early for their moment. #ThrowbackThursday #ArtificialLife #Evolution #Vanderbilt

Working in partnership with Turkana communities, Amanda Lea and collaborators sequenced 367 genomes and found strong evidence of natural selection on a kidney gene called STC1. These adaptations line up with the aridification of northern Africa ~5000 years ago. 📷 Photo credit: Sebastian Michel Mata

You are not alone. You never have been. Your gut contains roughly trillions of microbial cells. They digest food you can't, train your immune system & influence your mood. You inherit your first #microbiome from your mother. #Evolution built the handoff in. #FunFact

In 1925, a TN teacher was put on trial for teaching #evolution. Just a mile from where that law was signed, VU's Chancellor said "the answer...is the building of new labs for the teaching of science." 100 years later, we're still at it. 🏛️ #ThrowbackThursday #ScopesTrial

When it gets too hot, even the dayshift clocks out. Vanderbilt's Dr. Malu Jorge found that white-lipped peccaries in Brazil are shifting to nighttime activity as temperatures rise — and as keystone species, that affects the whole ecosystem. #Evolution

Fungi are more closely related to you than they are to plants. Yes, really. We share a common ancestor with fungi — and more genes with them than plants do. Oh, and the largest organism on Earth is a single honey fungus in Oregon! #FunFact #Fungi #Evolution

Excited to drop our visual systems pre-print 10 years in the making. We hacked nature's cheat code to protect the eye from light damage. This unexpectedly also boosts rod sensitivity. Huge thanks to collabs Tonia Rex, @amandalea.bsky.social , Alex Bick, and their labs! @evolutionvu.bsky.social

Heading to #Evol2026 in Cleveland June 20-24! Stop by the ESI booth for swag and a spin on the prize wheel. 🎡 @evolmtg.bsky.social #Evolution #Vanderbilt

Happy Graduation, Commodores 🎓⚓️ Class of ’26 — keep evolving. From late nights to big breakthroughs, you did the work. Proud of you, Vandy 💛🖤 #VandyGrad #ClassOf2026

Charlie Wilson spent his summers camping alone in mountain ranges, cooking his own meals, working ten hours a day mapping TNs geology. "My vacation is the fullest part of my year." Oh, and NASA gave him a grant to investigate a meteor crater. #ThrowbackThursday #Geology

New research from the @amandalea.bsky.social Lab shows female rhesus macaques exposed to early adversity faced steeper life-history trade-offs. "The quality of our early-life environment is obviously important, and can contribute to our physiology even decades later." @PNASNews 🐒 #Evolution

🌸 Hired to fill in while the men went to war. Never left. Elsie Quarterman became Vanderbilt's first female department chair, rediscovered a plant thought to be extinct, and lived to 103. Some people are irreplaceable. #ThrowbackThursday #WomenInScience #Botany #Vanderbilt

🐗 Meet Archaeotherium. #HellPigs. These extinct Eocene & Oligocene mammals had enormous heads, relatively small brains & were actually more closely related to whales than pigs. Vandy PhD student Brynn Wooten is using their fossilized teeth to learn what they ate #Evolution

We had a blast celebrating Earth Day this year! We had Greg Wilson Mantilla tell us about life at the edge of the K-Pg boundary and then we were at Nashville Earth Day meeting 1000s of locals to talk #evolution from #paleontology to bird beaks to microbes! What a week!!

We had a blast at @predsnhl.bsky.social Family Day this past Saturday 🏒🦴 Huge thanks to everyone who stopped by our table to explore fossils, ask great questions, and get hands-on with evolutionary science. Always fun bringing #evolution into the community 💛 #Smashville #Fossils

Trainee curling night = success 🥌 Great food, questionable technique, and a lot of laughs. Always good to get out of the lab and spend time together. Already taking requests for a rematch.

Great writeup about our new Museum Practices class from @evolutionvu.bsky.social www.vanderbilt.edu/evolution/mu...

One week out 🌍 ESI Earth Day Lecture with Greg Wilson Mantilla: Mass extinction → ecosystem recovery → rise of mammals 📅 April 15 ⏰ 2:30–3:30 PM 📍 MRBIII 1220 Free + open to all #EarthDay #Evolution #Paleontology

Mark your calendars for Earth Day at Centennial Park on April 18th! #NashvilleEarthDay #SustainableNashville #LoveYourPlanet

A sneak peak of one of the pages from the upcoming issue of Evolutionary Studies - the Magazine! Join us for #evolution out in the wild!

The Spring 2026 issue of Evolutionary Studies - the Magazine is almost here! From the science of chaos to ancient gut bacteria, bird song evolution to Nashville's wild winter, this issue has something for everyone! @kelleypaleolab.bsky.social #Evolution #Science #SciComm

How it started/ how it’s going. or, Who wore it better? #FossilFriday @evolutionvu.bsky.social

Elsie Quarterman joined Vandy in 1943; later became the university's first female department chair. Her research on Tennessee's cedar glades showed how plants #evolve to thrive where almost nothing else can. A true pioneer in science & in life #WomensHistoryMonth #WomenInScience

Two Rokas Lab members have received high praise from the university this week. Kyle David was named Postdoc of the Year and Olivia Riedling received the Provost Pathbreaking Discovery Award! https://www.vanderbilt.edu/evolution/two-from-rokas-lab-receive-university-accolades/ #Evolution #Yeast

In 1952, Ilda McVeigh was already studying how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics — one of the most urgent evolutionary challenges we face today. A Vanderbilt scientist ahead of her time. #WomensHistoryMonth #WomenInScience #Evolution

IT'S HAPPENING TODAY! 🐸🎊 Tyrone Hayes is at Vanderbilt in just a few hours talking about atrazine, frogs, corporate influence in science, and environmental racism. 3pm, see you there!

Happy Women's History Month! Meet Gisela Mosig — molecular biologist, Vanderbilt trailblazer, and one of the first scientists to uncover how DNA recombination drives genome #evolution. Oh, and she escaped 1940s Germany on a bicycle. Absolute legend. #WomenInScience

ONE WEEK OUT! 🎊 Tyrone Hayes is bringing the science AND the receipts about interference in environmental research. Next Wednesday, 3pm, MRB III 1220. Don't miss this one.

New this week! Female birds sing — and new Vanderbilt research explains how social behavior shapes that evolution. Dr. Kate Snyder analyzed 1,000+ songbird species and found cooperative breeding & female song reinforce each other over evolutionary time. 🐦🎶 Read more >> https://wp.me/pbblkY-116

Malu Jorge and PhD alum Michaela Peterson published cool work looking at the effects of climate change on white-lipped peccaries! Read more >> https://tinyurl.com/mr23kn7j #Science #Evolution

New work from graduate student Owen Hale (Behringer Lab)! The paper, "Elevated rates and biased spectra of mutations in anaerobically cultured lactic acid bacteria," was published in mBio. Hale tracked 3 species of bacteria through >1000 generations in oxygen-free conditions.

IT'S HAPPENING TODAY! 🔬🎊 Michael Lynch is here talking #evolutionary cell biology in just a few hours. If you're anywhere near campus, you absolutely need to be in show up at 3pm. This is the kind of lecture you'll be telling people about for years.

Some of my favorite Chuck D shirts #DarwinDay #evolution

ONE WEEK OUT! 🎊 Michael Lynch is coming to challenge everything you thought you knew about cellular #evolution. His work on population genetics has completely rewritten the rules. Also - he's led FOUR major scientific societies, so you know he's got stories. Next Tuesday, 3pm, See you there!

In TWO WEEKS we're hosting Michael Lynch for Darwin Day! 🎉 His work on the drift-barrier hypothesis completely changed how we think about genome architecture. Feb 18, 3pm, Learn more >> https://loom.ly/LEFV6dw

🎓 #Evolution education in action! ESI brought research to Tennessee students: elementary school science festivals, rural high school research programs, and Girl Scout badge workshops. Story: https://loom.ly/cACR5HY#Evolutionp.28-33

Science cover story reveals Turkana people evolved genetic adaptations ~5,000 years ago. In partnership with Turkana communities & Kenyan researchers. https://loom.ly/cACR5HY [p.14] #Evolution @amandalea.bsky.social

🐴 How do horses produce extreme energy without free radical damage? They evolved to "run" a genetic stop sign - a trick previously only seen in viruses. Clinical implications for Parkinson's & epilepsy. Story: https://loom.ly/cACR5HY [p.10] #evolution

TBT - just a couple of Friends of Darwin hanging out at the ESI annual retreat! 🧬 #ThrowbackThursday #Evolution

🎉 Fall 2025 Evolutionary Studies - the Magazine is live! Horses that ignore genetic stop signs, humans adapting to extreme deserts, the #evolution of birdsong, and our Friend of Darwin award. Read it: https://loom.ly/cACR5HY#evolution#science

🔊 Job Opportunity: Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Bacterial Evolution. Looking to recruit a postdoc to join a UKRI FLF-funded project on antibiotic resistance evolution in the microbiome 🦠 3 years funding, deadline 26th Jan, please share! hrwebapp.qub.ac.uk/tlive_webrec...