How time, climate, and storage shape DNA survival in herbarium specimens - and why plants from the tropics face tougher odds 🌿🧬 #AncientDNA www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How does life evolve to adapt to modern cities? Out now in Science, my PhD work with @lindymcbr.bsky.social uncovers the ancient origin of the “London Underground mosquito” – one of the most iconic examples of urban adaptation. 🧵(1/n) @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady4515

doi.org/10.1126/scie... #speciation #hybridization #ornithology

Excited to share our new paper where we find that the rise, decline and fall of clades is not explained by the usual suspects (diversity-dependence, ecological opportunities) but rather by species' insidious loss of macroevolutionary fitness: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/3

Human impacts on large mammals went well beyond triggering late Quaternary mass extinctions. A new paper by Brook et al. showing that biogeographic patterns were erased by the spread of domesticated species: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... A related paper is in press. Stay tuned.

"The genomics of discrete polymorphisms maintained by disruptive selection" www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

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

Extreme climate events can catalyze rapid evolutionary change! in our new Current Biology (@currentbiology.bsky.social) piece, Colin and I argue it’s time to study their evolutionary consequences systematically — beyond opportunistic observations. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Check out our perceptive on the Emerging uses of artificial intelligence in deep time biodiversity research www.nature.com/articles/s44... #AI #paleontology

Our paper, led by Eva van der Heijden, shows the work of an international team combining phylogenomics, hybridisation tests, population and comparative genomics and pheromone analyses to resolve the taxonomy and evolution of two rapid radiations of glasswing butterflies. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨 The New Age of global bird phylogenies continues! Hot on the heels of the fantastic updated tree created by @eliotmiller.bsky.social and others, we use a different approach to generate a near-comprehensive timetree of >9000 bird species. 1/3 www.cell.com/current-biol... 🧪🌐🪶

New paper out today in @pnas.org presenting near-complete phylogeny of the Grevilleoideae subfamily of Proteaceae plants, representing years of work and huge collaboration from an amazing team - ft. @marcelcardillo.bsky.social @hsauquet.bsky.social @austinmast.bsky.social and many others not on bsky

the current rate of extinction, as estimated by ourselves and others, whom we cited, and across diverse major taxa, we may well be headed in the direction of a new mass extinction event www.cell.com/trends/ecolo... 🌐🧪

Fresh off the presses in @currentbiology.bsky.social : Is the deuterostome clade an artefact? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... We (yours truly, Paschalis Natsidis, Laura Piovani and co-leads Paschalia Kapli and @maxjtelford.bsky.social) set out to try to answer this question. Why? (1/12)

I think I have been fortunate to work in an institution (and a department) that has been led by people who saw the importance of enabling flexibility between work and personal life. It was crucial when we faced a major personal family challenge some years ago, and remains a core principle

Excited to share our new paper in Molecular Ecology! Using whole-genome and morphological data from silvereyes, we explore their evolutionary history and find that water barriers are more effective than continental distances in driving population divergence 🐤🧬 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🚨🚨🚨!Post doc opportunity! 🚨🚨🚨 35 month post doc on niche modelling of migratory whales in my lab with Katrina Jones. Job advert below: my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru... Please get in touch with questions!

For anyone interested in extinctions and macroevolution more generally here is the recording of the hybrid symposium on approaches to extinctions which was held in Vilnius a month ago. sites.google.com/view/mathssx... 🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio #Geology

daily mollusk - bivalve functional group extinction and survival. cool stuff by @spissatella.bsky.social and others 🧪

It's back! The Society of Systematic Biologists is running Year 3 of the Mentorship Program! Find community, support your colleagues, and talk trees. Apply by June 10th, 2025. Program info: www.systbio.org/mentorship-p... Application form: forms.gle/QtD22C9dtfRF... @systbiol.bsky.social

What's new in the world of adaptive radiation?! Here's what we think! academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a... Out now in @evojlinnsoc.bsky.social! Wonderful writing this with Julia Day, @fishspeciation.bsky.social, and María del Rosario Castañeda

Thrilled to share the 3rd and largest paper from my PhD!🎉: "Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Non-Ecological Speciation in Rubyspot Damselflies" is out now in Molecular Ecology! ⬇️Includes divergence times and an F1 hybrid Thanks to my fantastic co-authors & collaborators! 📖 doi.org/10.1111/mec.... 🧬🌎🧪

Although species vary in their #phenological response to #climate change, some food-chains and webs are surprisingly resilient... On the anniversary of my @globalchangebio.bsky.social paper with @allyphillimore.bsky.social, I wanted to revisit some of the key ideas 👇 tinyurl.com/BufferCater 🧵1/6

I'm reviewing applicants later this week and will continue to accept new applications until the position is filled

It's finally out! Together with Allison Yi Hsiang and @fieldpalaeo.bsky.social, we explored relative homoplasy in a range of bird matrices and introduce a new parsimony measure, the relative homoplasy index (RHI) (1/n) academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/a...

I am very pleased to announce that my first scientific paper & first author paper, has just been published ! Rise of the King: Gondwanan Origins and Evolution of Megaraptoran Dinosaurs royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Meta-analysis reveals that phenotypic plasticity and divergent selection promote reproductive isolation during incipient speciation www.nature.com/articles/s41... #evobio #speciation 🧪

"This contradicts the expectation that postextinction biotas should be regionally homogenized by the spread of disaster taxa and impoverished by diversity loss." 🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio #Macroecology www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Happy to share my new article on how morphological diversification proceeds during evolutionary radiations: "The diffused evolutionary dynamics of morphological novelty" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵 1/12

A nice commentary by @pdpolly.bsky.social on our recent @pnas.org paper emphasising one of our findings that late Cretaceous dinosaur, mammalian and generally tetrapod ecological community structure changed before the asteroid 🌐🧪 doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #evobio #paleosky #dinosaur #paleontology

Thrilled to share my second PhD paper with @tomezard.bsky.social & @evoswami.bsky.social focused on the application of landmark-free geometric morphometrics! 🎉 Excited to contribute to advancing shape analysis techniques in biology. Check it out here: doi.org/10.1186/s128...

alright i have my laptop, guess i'm livetweeting the dire wolf preprint. so a quick reminder: this is not yet peer-reviewed, so there's some different expectations re: quality. also let's be clear, i'm a hella biased reader, bc i don't trust the hype they're courting

🧪🌐 #PaleoSky #paleontology

Evolutionary Lability of Sexual Selection and Its Implications for Speciation and Macroevolution www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Great to see our new review on the causes and consequences of tropical insect declines out in Nature Reviews Biodiversity. 🪰🪲🐜🐛🐝🦋 It was a pleasure working with an international team of amazing tropical entomologists! 🧑‍🔬 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I feel honored that our work: "On the origin of an insular hybrid butterfly lineage" was picked as "Editor's choice" and that my picture of a mating couple (🧡🤎) covers the latest issue of Evolution @journal-evo.bsky.social. Link to paper: academic.oup.com/evolut/artic... (1/8)

Changes in abundance and distribution of European forest bird populations depend on biome, ecological specialisation and traits vist.ly/3mytx8e #Birds #HabitatDegradation #ClimateChange

I wrote about how population stratification in genetic analyses led to a decade of false findings and almost certainly continues to bias emerging results. But we are starting to have statistical tools to sniff it out. A 🧵:

Cool paper by @cocomacro.bsky.social et al. showing the diverse diversification history of hymenoptera in the fossil record! doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... #macroevolution #evolution #paleobiology @morethanadodo.bsky.social

Now published @pnas.org , we show the stepwise changes in species-area relationships across the K/Pg mass extinction! doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #macroevolution #paleobiology #massextinction #evolution #macroecology @oxuniearthsci.bsky.social

Out now in @pnas.org , we study the recovery dynamics of biodiversity across the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction. We quantify how species-area relationships – how diversity scales with geographic area – have changed for dinosaurs, mammals and others: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Exciting news! @wcratcliff.bsky.social and I published an essay last week in @nature.com reviewing the substantial contributions of 'long-term' studies to evolutionary biology www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/n

New 🗒️led by Alex Pigot - Macroecological rules predict how biomass scales with species richness in nature -Standing biomass increases with richness when large-bodied spp are numerically rare but independent when spp size & abundance are uncoupled. @ucl.ac.uk - Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Review article on the biotic interactions in the fossil record, with interesting forward suggestion for future studies. 🧪 #Paleobio ⚒️ #Geology #EvoBio #Macroecology doi.org/10.1017/pab....

The third part of my PhD work is now out on Early View in @ecography.bsky.social, available #OpenAccess. 🌐🐚 We were interested in how macroecological patterns recreated from OBIS data might differ from those seen in the field and across methods - nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🧵 1/ New study on squamate color evolution hits the press: we show that brightness variation in lizards & snakes is strongly linked to habitat openness 🌞 This reveals how ecological pressures drive color evolution in one of the most diverse groups of tetrapods www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📣 New study out in @ecol-evol.bsky.social on the population genomics of the cotton leafworm #Spodoptera_littoralis Another great collaboration with @inrae-dgimi.bsky.social ! led by: @kadurand.bsky.social and #Kiwoong_Nam @cbgpmontpellier.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

1/6 Paper Alert📢📢📢 New publication from #ECONOVO on the widespread ecological novelty across the terrestrial biosphere🌱 Read the article here: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Key take homes below👇