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📣 Grad student wanted PhD position in avian evolution, with emphasis on phylogenetics, macroevolution, Neotropical radiations, flight and dispersal. Based at the University of New Orleans (soon to be LSU New Orleans). Start: September 2026. Contact me if interested. claramuntlab.org

Usually described as “raucous” and “cacophonous,” the Brown Cacholote is an energetic South American ovenbird. The bird announces its presence by performing its long, loud series of grating notes from treetops. Listen to some duets here: birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/brncac1

Honeyguides from the Varswater Formation (Pliocene of South Africa), the oldest known fossil honeyguides: riviste.unimi.it/index.php/RI... 🪶🧪 (📷Louchart et al.)

🚨NEW PAPER OUT🚨 The anatomy of bird lower jaw bones has been understudied...until now! Here, we examine avian mandibular anatomy, answering some and raising more questions about the phylogenetic affinities of key early crown-group birds. Read on! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Myiarchus flycatchers ordered by size and intensity of yellow underparts. When it comes to flycatchers, differences between species tend to be very subtle. Impressions of size and color in the field can be quite subjective, but the differences are real.

Snowy Ptarmigans!

Remarkable photo illustrating (American) Woodcock visual field macaulaylibrary.org/asset/616675...

'Sandpipers' by Julia Berman.

How did birds evolve? The answer is wilder than anyone thought www.nature.com/articles/d41...

OMG I'm in IFLScience!

Birds have a thick retina devoid of blood vessels - so how do they ensure sufficient oxygen availability? They don't - neurons rely on glycolysis, metabolizing glucose released from the pecten. Insane new study that includes comparative data on lizards and crocs.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What's larger, a protein or its templating mRNA ? > The mRNA is much larger. ⬛ 𝐀 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐞 -- 𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 & 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬 -- 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐮𝐥 𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡. The figure shows myoglobin protein drawn to scale next to its mRNA template. The coding sequence of an mRNA ...

New halcyornithid (early close relative of parrots and passerines) Scopsoides feisti: www.schweizerbart.de/papers/njgpa... (From late last year, but I didn't get a copy of the paper until recently.) 🪶🧪 (📷Mayr)

New specimens of the nightjar-like Hassiavis: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Some of the new anatomical information here suggests that it might have been more closely related to owlet-nightjars, swifts, and hummingbirds than to true nightjars. 🪶🧪 (📷Mayr & Richter)

The great @jembrown.bsky.social closing out #ssb2026 It was a wonderful meeting thanks to the hardwork of Jeremy and funding from @lsu.bsky.social and other sources. Systematic biology is alive and well. Especially proud of all the Global South who attended.

Strong @lsu.bsky.social contingent at #ssb2026 - LSU alumni and current folks

“Scientific societies can support you and foster you through your whole career” - SSB President @trayc7.bsky.social opening the #ssb2026 meeting Can’t join us today? Make sure your registration is up to date to keep up with SSB news and happenings www.systbio.org

New paper out! 🐦📊 We realease AVONICHE, a global dataset with detailed information on the proportional use of 32 foraging niches, combining dietary categories with the behaviours and substrates used to access resources. Openly access the paper and data in GEB: doi.org/10.1111/geb....

LSU Museum of Natural Sciences is hiring a postdoc! Come join our very active and supportive museum community. Applicants can work with any of the major divisions: 🐀🦜🦎🐸🐠 Review begins February 15th, please share! lsu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/LSU/job/0119...

NBC @neobirdconserve.bsky.social Conservation Fund supports projects to conserve threatened Neotropical birds by small grants of USD 1000–3000. Next deadline = 1 Feb. More information & application forms (English/Español/Português): neotropicalbirdingandconservation.org/conservation/ #ornithology

In "Biologists Unite," Daniel Chiu Suarez provides an inside account of the rise and fall of ecosystem services, a burgeoning field of science dedicated to analyzing the many valuable “services” nature provides to humanity. Available #OpenAccess: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255338...

Very excited for this incredible lineup of talks at #SSB2026! ssb2026.github.io/talks.html For those giving talks, more instructions will be sent shortly. @systbiol.bsky.social

Some of your cells are not genetically yours — what can they tell us about life and death? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

📢 NEW SPECIAL ISSUE OUT! Excited to share a special issue I co-edited on bird–window collisions, a major yet overlooked source of bird mortality Bringing together 8 papers, this issue advances methods, evidence, and solutions to inform bird-friendly(er) built environments OA: tinyurl.com/yss5mvf2

How should the discipline of ecology and the community of ecologists respond to the ecological crisis? Is it time that these were put on something more akin to an emergency footing? www.cell.com/action/showP...

🔈 CALL FOR PAPERS IBIS Special Issue Collections-Based Ornithological Research in a Changing World Submission deadline: 30 June 2026 onlinelibrary.wiley.... #ornithology 🪶

NEW METHODS ARTICLE: Phylogenetic GLMMs open doors to study evolution of discrete traits. We show how binary models extend to ordinal & nominal traits, using bird data, and provide tutorials to make these methods accessible to evolutionary biologists: doi.org/10.1093/jeb/... Mizuno et al.

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too! preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵 Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/9

Preprint! Ever wondered why individuals within the same species migrate differently? Or what drives some animals to become partial migrants? Then, this paper is for you! Our new paper synthesizes the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that shape partial migration. Link: doi.org/10.22541/au....

I have a new preprint demonstrating a genome-architecture-aware approach to inferring species trees and introgression landscapes from a small number of genomes. If you are interested in phylogenomics, birds, or hybridization, this is for you! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A quick reminder for everyone registered for SSB2026: please take a moment to complete the survey to submit lightning talks, sign up for workshops, and indicate your interest in other meeting activities. If you haven’t filled it out yet, today’s the day! We're excited to see you all in January!

New possible stem-falcon Masillaraptor buchheimi: deepblue.lib.umich.edu/items/616a40... 🪶🧪 (📷Li et al.)

Fossil birds from the Quaternary of Brazil, with insights into the geologic age and ecology of the extinct vulture Pleistovultur: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🪶🧪 (📷da Costa et al.)

We got published in Ecology&Evolution! We propose an equation from which we derive the fundamental equations of population ecology and evolutionary biology (the Price equation). #evobio #philbio onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Wutt!? New ecosystem service just dropped. Birds are fungi dispersers! And, even better, tapaculos are truffle dispersers! My week is complete.

Our special issue on Evolutionary Functions of Consciousness, coedited with Tecumseh Fitch and Adina Roskies, now online royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202... Contributions by (1) Irina Mikhalevich; (2) Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg; (3) Nicholas Humphrey; (cont'd)

I am extremely happy to see that our review on fossil tip-dating is out in early view in Systematic Biology! A huge thanks to all the authors of this massive project (@heckeberg.bsky.social, @basantakhakurel.bsky.social, Gustavo Darlim, and @hoehna.bsky.social)! academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

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...