"Ten simple rules for postdoctoral mums to stay competitive in academia" provides good advice for anyone, but great to see an article focused on having a life in science

Our latest: Conflict in ant phylogeny results from complex interaction between multiple evolutionary signals and tree reconstruction artifacts.

My spring vacation reading has arrived!

Final day of the Iberian Cordillera Fieldtrip, our Palaeontology & Evolution students @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social visited Museu de las Ciencias de la Terra in Alacasser and on to the K-Pg boundary section in Agost

Day 6 of the Iberian Cordillera Fieldtrip, our Palaeontology & Evolution students @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social visited Museo de Paleontología de Castilla-La Mancha, constructed food webs for Las Hoyas from museum collections, and debated museum designs and communicating palaeontology to the public

Day 5 of the Iberian Cordillera Fieldtrip, our Palaeontology & Evolution students @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social investigated the Lower Cretaceous Las Hoyas wetland with its exceptionally preserved dinosaurs, birds, early mammals and early members of the flowering plants

Day 4 of the Iberian Cordillera Fieldtrip, our Palaeontology & Evolution students @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social constructed a sea level curve and palaeogeography for middle and upper Ordovician of Fombuena

Day 3 of the Iberian Cordillera Fieldtrip, our Palaeontology & Evolution students @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social investigated the taphonomy of cinctans (bilateral stem-echinoderms) and the nature of middle Cambrian marine environments

Day 2 of the Iberian Cordillera Fieldtrip for our Palaeontology & Evolution students @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social we looked at exceptional preservation in Miocene lakes and Cretaceous deltas

Today was Day 1 of the Iberian Cordillera Fieldtrip for our Palaeontology & Evolution students @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social. We packed in a flight to Alicante and a drive to Teruel to visit Dinopolis and Albarracin to visit the Jurassic Seas museum

If you are looking for an example of best-practice in abstract-writing, this is a good starting point

Our latest: Dermoskeletal histology of Moythomasia and the evolution of the vertebrate dermal skeleton, led by Xianren Shan and Edine Pape, with a little help from Martin Rucklin @evopalaeo.bsky.social and Davide Pisani @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social

Go @kirstenflett.bsky.social !!!

Thanks to Yinuo and Wei for organising such an excellent Spring Festival meal @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social last night - enough to attract our alums Eleonora and Mattia from Ireland and Spain!

Our latest: A new dead (jawless) fish from the early Silurian of China, informs on the nature of the ancestral galeaspid. Led by Yumeng Zhang from Zhikun Gai's group at IVPP

Congrats to @ruolinwu.bsky.social who is now officially Dr Wu! @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social

📢 Open faculty position – Origins of Life We have an opening in our section at the University of Geneva! 🧬🚀 SPREAD THE WORD Apply here: jobs.unige.ch/www/wd_porta...

Our latest: Independent origins of spicules reconcile paleontological and molecular evidence of sponge evolutionary history, led by @meleonora-rossi.bsky.social with help from friends @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social including @anariesgo.bsky.social @evopalaeo.bsky.social Davide Pisani and many others

Join us for interesting discussions at the Computational Approaches to Early Evolution workshop next year in April at OIST in Onna, Okinawa! 🦠💻🧬 Registrations open until January 2nd '26, do not miss it! More info & registration details in the link below! 🔽 www.oist.jp/conference/c...

Pre-Christmas moleclular-clock shenanigans with @sabifo4.bsky.social @mariodosreis.bsky.social @zihengyang.bsky.social

As we head into the festive period, don't forget to apply for my awesome project (including much cleverer co-supervisors) on flowering plant (genome) evolution by January 8. You know you'll regret it if you don't! 🎄🧑‍🎄🔔🎁☃️❄️

Festive update on chondrichthyan jaw evolution: Evolution of chondrichthyan jaw morphology, from ecological generalists to specialists, led by Ben Griffin, with help from @evopalaeo.bsky.social @euphanerops.bsky.social @emilyrayfield.bsky.social Pablo Milla Carmona and Zerina Johanson

The Royal Society's Newton International Fellowship scheme opens to applications Jan 15 with a March 11 deadline. It provides £280K (salary and research expenses) over 2 years to outstanding ECRs from outside the UK. Why not come and work with me (or anyone else) @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social?

Our latest, led by the inimitable Chris Kay "Dated gene duplications elucidate the evolutionary assembly of eukaryotes" in which we used gene duplications to test hypotheses of eukaryogenesis. TLDR? They're all wrong. With @tweethinking.bsky.social @anya1.bsky.social @ssolo.bsky.social Davide Pisani

Just back from a few days scanning tiny fossils @psich.bsky.social Swiss Light Source. TOMCAT is still in commissioning phase but sub micron resolution scans are down to 90 seconds!

Come and do a PhD on 'Genome duplication, extinction and diversification in the evolution of flowering plants' with myself @jameswclark.bsky.social and Ilia Leitch @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social and join the @wgdip.bsky.social studying rediploidisation. Apply: tinyurl.com/26pmfvvc by Jan 8

Pleased to be a small part of this molecular palaeobiology study by Jialin Wei, led by Marta Álvarez-Presas and Jordi Paps, with help from Davide Pisani. Animals repeatedly used similar genomic solutions to the challenges of terrestrialization @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social @bristolbiosci.bsky.social

NERC GW4+ PhD: Genome duplication, extinction and diversification in the evolution of flowering plants, supervised by Phil Donoghue, James Clark and Ilia Leitch. Deets soon but get in touch with @phil-donoghue.bsky.social if interested. Jan 8 application deadline @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social

Our latest: Investigating the morphogenesis and replacement of lamprey toothlets using synchrotron imaging, led by Madleen Grohganz @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social, just out in Journal of Morphology. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Our latest, led by Edu Ocaña-Pallarès and @ssolo.bsky.social, a timescale for fungal phylogeny that wrangles calibration from the unstructured fossil record of fungi and a history of horizontal gene transfers www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The proceedings volume from our Nov24 meeting on the evolution of biospheres is just in PhilTransB @royalsocietypublishing.org delivering insights into how our biosphere evolved - and how other biospheres may evolve

Lots of fun last night in the lab get together at Siji Minfu Roast Duck Restaurant in Hepingli, Beijing

Our latest "Morphological constraints in hymenopteran forewings limit flight efficiency optimization" led by Iman Fadel, with help from Pablo Milla Carmona, Yuming Liu and @emilyrayfield.bsky.social

Our latest, led by @jameswclark.bsky.social of @milnerevolution.bsky.social shows that the notorious mismatch between molecular and palaeontological estimates for the timing of origin of angiosperms is a consequence of equivocal interpretation of their fossil record @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social

The latest issue of eVOLUCIÓN @sesbe-org.bsky.social includes me pontificating on all manner of topics evolutionary. sesbe.org/revista-evol...

Thanks to Carlos Martinez, Sonia Ros, Jesus Marugan, Hugo Martin-Abad and friends for making @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social Iberian Cordillera field trip such a success for our BSc/MSci Palaeontology & Evolution students

Barcelona in October and research on the origins of multicellularity - how could anyone resist this meeting?

The last bit of Frankie Dunn's PhD is finally published! @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Really pleased to be part of this project which shows that aerobic bacteria arose in the Archaean, long before the GOE - after which aerobes proliferated through HGT. Fun @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social collab including @tweethinking.bsky.social @sabifo4.bsky.social @emoody.bsky.social Davide Pisani

This interesting article on reviewer fatigue prompts me to publicize my most over-used web resource: JANE - the Journal Author Name Estimator jane.biosemantics.org which, based on an abstract, can help authors find a home for their manuscripts and help editors to find reviewers for submissions

Our latest: Evolution of herbivory, not terrestrialization, drove morphological change in the mandibles of Palaeozoic, led by @harryberks.bsky.social with help from Pablo Milla Carmona @emilyrayfield.bsky.social and myself @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social. Out now in @evojlinnsoc.bsky.social

Should the future of scientific publishing lie with megapublishers who return profits to shareholders, or with professional societies that plough their returns back into science and scientific communities? Vote now with your manuscript submissions!

@thepalass.bsky.social and @nhm-london.bsky.social are hosting a FREE workshop at the Natural History Museum, London on May 15, 2-4 pm for in person and online attendees: Fossil Collecting In England and Wales: Do We Need More Legislation? 🌐 Sign up: buff.ly/LXtoUao

About a week to go to the application deadline for this position - please get in touch if you have questions!

Job Alert: Senior Research Associate in Phylogenomics @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social researching timing, sequence and phenotypic consequences of rediploidisation following whole genome duplication - comparative genomics, molecular clock and phenotypic disparity methods, with @jameswclark.bsky.social

Our latest: a Richard Boyle (Exeter) production, using simulations to show how differential selection of biogeochemical cycles can lead to planetary homeostasis, with some empirical data from @emoody.bsky.social and @sabifo4.bsky.social @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social

I'd like to remind everyone that February is the worst month of the year

Lectureship in Evolutionary Biology up for grabs @bristolbiosci.bsky.social for someone who studies "evolutionary processes and the emergence of large-scale patterns of organismal diversity using comparative genomics, and/or bioinformatics. Application deadline February 16

Our latest, led by Mattia Giacomelli and Davide Pisani, shows the power of CAT-PMSF in ML analyses of genome scale datasets. Mattia used it to test hypotheses of panarthropod relationships, finding Lobopodia (Tardigrada,(Onychophora, Euarthropoda)) best supported academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

PostDoc position in evolutionary genomics available with Dan MacQueen at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, part of our BBSRC sLoLa on rediploidisation following whole genome duplication