Our synthesis on patterns of bird diversity and diversification dynamics in South America is available online: books.google.com/books?id=lyi...

Our paper on tinamou evolution is finally out in @systbiol.bsky.social. academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

Yes - isometric scaling as a way to understand the benefits and costs of being small versus large. Haldane's Harpers article from 1926 is an amazing example of popular science writing.

Continuing our series on difficult comparative models - and how to address them properly - we’re happy to showcase another study, this time in @jevbio.bsky.social academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-... We will guide you through a series of increasingly complex models, from binary, through ordered to

This looks to be a fundamental theoretical advance by @jpodwyer.bsky.social et al. Using linkage disequlibrium-based Ne to back out σ² and then predict fluctuation sizes from a single temporal snapshot is a real advance for broad application 🧪🌐https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu6396

Juncos and ginkgos! 🐦 🍂

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

New review out! With students in my lab, we explore how population size shapes speciation—from drift in small populations to selection in large ones. Do small or large populations speciate faster? The answer is more nuanced than you might think. esj-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Linking habitat preferences and fitness across scales for a relict bird species of the southern Andes | www.nature.com/artic... | Scientific Reports | #ornithology 🪶

Large citizen science datasets are powerful tools for biodiversity science, but they may have biases. Nice new paper from @louisbackstrom.bsky.social et al. showing that for eBird and Birdtrack lists there is a tendency for rare species to be over-represented onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Ok, we're down to the last 10 (!) spots available to register for #SSB2026 in Baton Rouge in January. Who's in? ssb2026.github.io @systbiol.bsky.social

The most important paper in evolutionary biology I'd never heard of: 1/ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A Pileated Woodpecker passing by overhead.

Sad news: Jane Goodall has died. She did more than any other human for our understanding and appreciation of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. That chimpanzees are Endangered tells you everything about our species and about what made her so exceptional. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/o...

Join us! We are hiring a new #curator at the #AMNH in #Vertebrate #Zoology careers.amnh.org/postings/4600 #academicjobs #tenuretrack

1 week left to get your image in for Evolution 2026 logo contest! www.evolutionmeetings.org/2026-logo-co...

Due Monday - don’t hesitate!

The ever more detailed data coming from bird tracking devices is letting researcher gauge whether migrating birds are threatened by offshore wind development. #ornithology

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...