How many mammal species are there now? Updates and trends in taxonomic, nomenclatural, and geographic knowledge url: academic.oup.com/jmammal/arti...

SOUTH AMERICA HEAT WAVE Brutally hot night in PARAGUAY🇵🇾: Minimums up to 28.6C, but next night is the goat.. and can be the hottest September night in all Hemisphere history ! In ARGENTINA🇦🇷 Monthly record broken at Oran with 42.3C Tomorrow will be historic

Our new paper @asn-amnat.bsky.social develops a Grand Unified Theory including both exploitative and interference competition doi.org/10.1086/737628. The R* rule of ecology (that 2 species cannot coexist on a single resource), is widely broken, including via a new trade-off we describe. 1/9

New from #BiologyLetters: Combining fossil taxa with and without morphological data improves dated phylogenetic analyses buff.ly/abJm5Zv | #Evolution #Palaeontology #Taxonomy

Check out this cool work from @crouxevo.bsky.social and others, congrats!!! 🥳 Rapid establishment of species barriers in plants compared with that in animals | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

An Intergeneric Hybrid Between Historically Isolated Temperate and Tropical Jays Following Recent Range Expansion | doi.org/10.1002/ece3... | Ecology and Evolution | #ornithology 🪶

super excited to share this big project with @daeaton.bsky.social out now in Systematic Biology! We derived distributions for -- given an arbitrary species tree model -- how far you have to move along a genome before observing a change in the underlying genealogy: doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

Unsolicited listicle: My list of the most criminally underused/underappreciated phylogenetic comparative methods. Note, I am not involved in ANY of these methods; but I see them as things people are often asking of comparative data but have been surprised at how infrequently they have been cited.

Excited to share our new paper on flight morphology and migration in North American wood warblers. Surprisingly, ground-dwelling warblers may be better adapted for migration than aerial ones!!! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

My feather cell type paper is finally out! doi.org/10.1111/ede.... We’ve packed a ton of stuff into this paper but I’ll go through some highlights in this thread!

Ecomorphology of the bird lumbosacral organ: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... 🪶🧪 (📷Pelletan et al.)

C. Zhang, R. Nielsen and S. Mirarab integrate all ASTRAL-like methods into a single package called ASTER, comprising several tools that collectively enhance the scalability, accuracy, and versatility of species tree inference. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf172 #evobio #molbio #compbio

🚨Big news🚨 A Pocket Guide to Scientific Writing and Publishing is out🎉 This is the book I wish I’d had 20 years ago — short, practical, and designed to help researchers write & get their papers published I hope it helps many Please share with anyone who might benefit! 👉 mybook.to/ScienceGuide

Registration is now open for #SSB2026! I'm so excited to see many of you here in Baton Rouge in January! We're going to hear great talks, discuss the immeasurable value of natural history collections, and continue to strengthen our scientific community. ssb2026.github.io @systbiol.bsky.social

Linking performance to powerhouse: mitochondrial aerobic metabolism in blood cells reflects flight endurance of house sparrows (Passer domesticus) | royalsocietypublishi... | Biology Letters | #ornithology 🪶

#ornithology www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A recent study of seabird collisions with human-made structures published in the WJO turned up over 400 such incidents, involving seabirds including pelicans, gulls, and even albatrosses. #ornithology

Shape-shifting in relative wing length of juvenile shorebirds: no evidence of developmental temperatures driving morphological changes vist.ly/32exv #BodyMass #Morphology #ShoreBirds #WingLength

Exhilarating to see organismal agency in evolution at such a large scale! Organisms chose where to live and what to eat, and only after tens of thousands of generations and after much later speciation events the efficiency was achieved www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.... 🧪 ⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio #EvoBio

Our new review on numerical cognition in birds, just out in Nature Reviews Psychology! 🐦🧠 Behavior, neurobiology & field studies across avian species Very fond of the neurobiology part :) 📖 Read it here: rdcu.be/eyErI

How Randomness Can Flip Evolution: New Study Uncovers Surprising Role of Population Noise Summary & Analysis by Tahirah Williams of “Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics for Finite Populations and the Noise-Induced Reversal of Selection” by Bhat et al. www.amnat.org/an/newpapers...

🚨 First PhD chapter is out! My work thus far, with @andy2dobson.bsky.social We found that formerly common species have declined the fastest, on average. 📄 North American bird declines are driven by reductions in common species | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🚨 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... 🧪🌐🪶

Not to state the obvious, but some birds fly better than others. The ones that are awesome at flying -- this means they can get around obstacles, right? Expand their ranges as needed? Maybe be a little less vulnerable to extinction? Turns out it's SUPER complicated. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Happy to share our latest paper in which we use a new big phylogeny of birds to analyze the relationships between dispersal, geographic range size and diversification rates across all birds. See also post by ‪@sheardcat.bsky.social‬ and @josephtobias.bsky.social www.cell.com/current-biol...

Enlargement of sternum traits facilitated the evolution of powered flight in birds | www.nature.com/artic... | Nature Ecology and Evolution | #ornithology 🪶

There's a new guest post on the WOS blog! Riley Lawson describes the backstory of his recent paper in The Wilson Journal of #Ornithology, which documents the underappreciated threat that collisions with anthropogenic structures pose to #seabirds. wilsonsociety.org/2025/07/28/g...

Tracing the evolutionary and genetic footprints of atmospheric tillandsioids transition from land to air doi.org/10.1038/s414... #PlantGenomics #Evolution #Phylogenomics #Tillandsioideae #Bioinformatics #Systematics #BigData #PlantSci

Quedan tres semanas para aplicar al Taller Suraméricano de Biología Evolutiva en Uruguay (nov 23-29) Todos los gastos pagos para estudiantes, gracias a la financiación del @sse-evolution.bsky.social @eseb.bsky.social @asn-amnat.bsky.social #CienciaCriolla Info aquí: sites.google.com/view/evosur2...

Your daily Avian Hybrids story! A genetic model for punctuated equilibria avianhybrids.wordpress.com/2020/01/23/a...

Evolution of the sternum (breastbone) in birds and other pennaraptoran dinosaurs: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🪶🧪 (📷 @talialm.bsky.social et al.)

Thrilled to share the final chapter of ‪@talialm.bsky.socia’s dissertation — just published! This paper is the capstone of her PhD work and a major contribution to our understanding of the early evolution of birds and flight. 🦅 Way to go, Talia! 🥳

Have you ever wondered about the origin of birds restricted to specific regions? Led by doctoral student Hevana Lima, we attempt to unravel the origins of birds endemic to the Caatinga dry forests in Brazil. Check our ms out! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

IN-DEPTH: Read the short blogpost and watch the video by #PedroSaezGomez about how to use a GPS/VHF tag with a soluble backpack harness to track small, elusive birds. blog ➡️ vist.ly/3ypes instruction video ➡️ vist.ly/3ypev #ornithology #birds #tracking #VHF #lightweight #gps

Now published!!!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In #GENETICS, @3rdreviewer.bsky.social‬ and @smishra677.bsky.social‬ show it is possible to estimate recombination solely using the allele frequency spectrum and provide a genealogical interpretation of the results, showing how #MachineLearning can provide insights into biology. buff.ly/emixz9W

Our latest paper "Trait-based selection of seeds ingested and dispersed by North American waterfowl" is on the cover of Plants #seeddispersal #ducks #endozoochory #waterfowl @ebdonana.bsky.social @mdpiopenaccess.bsky.social www.mdpi.com/2223-7747/14...

#ornithology #birds #radiotracking

A short Quick Tip video showing how to concatenate and deconcatenate matrices in Mesquite 4. youtu.be/1etP6D3SrdE 🧪 #evolbio @bembidion.bsky.social

Welcome a new family of #birds, the Caribbean cave rails, Nesotrochidae! They were—surprisingly—the sisters of NZ adzebills, all sadly extinct. New #OpenAccess paper out in Avian #Systematics w Gerald Mayr, Chen Guangji & Feng Shaohong: www.avespress.com/uploads/down... 🧵 #ornithology #taxonomy 🧪🪶

🆕 Preprint now on bioRxiv! We introduce a covarion model for phylogenetic inference using discrete morphological data, addressing lineage- and character-specific rate heterogeneity. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #phylogenetics #morphology #covarion #evolution

NEW PAPER: Flying stimulates the antioxidant system and protects against oxidative damage in a migratory songbird, yet diet quality has little effect on oxidative status. ➡️ vist.ly/3n728fb #ornithology #birds #oxidativestress #migration #flight #antioxidants #physiology

Mesquite 4.0 released! A major update — many new features, small and large (phylogenomics, visualizations, workflow management, &c). Check out the trailer video: www.mesquiteproject.org. Come discuss in our new Google Group (groups.google.com/g/mesquite-project). @bembidion.bsky.social ‬🧪 #evolbio

Online early in the WJO: Minor mist-net injuries do not affect apparent annual survival in Cliff Swallows. #ornithology www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

How many paths lead to evolutionary innovation? How versatile are genomic toolkits? Excited to announce my new @pnas.org paper addressing these questions in collaboration with @rokaslab.bsky.social, @hittingerlab.bsky.social, and the Pennell lab! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

💥📉Ignite: Biomass and abundance trends diverge as the North American avifauna undergoes widespread demographic declines vist.ly/3n77wjc #BiomassFlux #BiomassTrends #CommunityRestructuring #EcosystemFunction #ThreeBillionBirds

Line up of talks by Coop lab folks #Evol2025 (do double check times): @kitchensjn.bsky.social Reconstructing the spatial histories of populations from ancestral recombination graphs June 21st Sat. 2:45 PM. Population Genetic Theory III. 1/n

I’m recruiting graduate students to join my lab at the University of New Orleans starting in January or September 2026! If you're at #Evol2025 and curious about my research, come to my talk on Saturday at 11:30 AM in Macroevolution & Diversification II. Contact me if interested. claramuntlab.org