Our work on the Last Universal Common Ancestor is out!! 🧬💻 To improve data reproducibility and accessibility, I have created a GitHub repository that documents the steps you need to follow to reproduce all our timetree inference analyses. (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Integration of phylogenetics, comparative genomics and palaeobiological approaches suggests that the last universal common ancestor lived about 4.2 billion years ago and was a complex prokaryote-grade...
Very interesting new paper about abolishing the 'micro- vs. macroevolution' divide by @maureenmkearney.bsky.social@bruceslieberman.bsky.social, & Luke Strotz!
Abstract. Ever since the Modern Synthesis, a debate about the relationship between microevolution and macroevolution has persisted—specifically, whether th
My most reliable advisor, mentor, and advocate just retired from my undergrad institution. Here's a story in the alumni magazine about her spectacular and impactful career (which continues!). I was fortunate to be able to write a piece of this. In case you wonder what success at a PUI looks like.🧪
Beth Braker Professor of Biology Years at Occidental: 33 What attracted you to Occidental? So many things! I was searching for a position at a liberal arts college, and Oxy had a lot of what I was loo...
How Life Thrives Under the Ocean's Crushing Pressure deepseanews.com/2024/06/how-...
Like most deep-sea biologists, I have a large collection of decorated Styrofoam cups. A couple dozen line the bookshelf of my office, each displaying a rainbow of Sharpie colors. Each cup is painstaki...
Since this kind of resource does not seem to exist, I am trying to create one. What columns would be useful for you if they existed in an ecoevo journals database? Feel free to reply here or in the google sheet: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...
Insights gained through our approach so far include 1) avoids false-positive SSE results, 2) infers local vs global trait effects (e.g. due to ecological opportunity), 3) gives the proportion of rate variation explained by a trait, and 4) identifies yet unexplained rate shifts. Link: t.co/lRnDQbdSoZ
Abstract. Evolution proceeds unevenly across the tree of life, with some lineages accumulating diversity more rapidly than others. Explaining this disparit
here's a video of one with some more information, from MBARI: youtu.be/6y7-0eG3LyQ?...
This whalefish (family Cetomimidae) was spotted by Steve Haddock and his team on their recent R/V Western Flyer expedition 2,013 meters (6,604 feet) deep off...
Our new work on how imbalanced speciation pulses sustain the radiation of mammals with N. Lartillot and H. Morlon is out in Science! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
The evolutionary histories of major clades, including mammals, often comprise changes in their diversification dynamics, but how these changes occur remains debated. We combined comprehensive phylogen...
After two years of work, our group has managed to get body sizes for 88% of the gastropods! Of the 38,816 species, we have size measurements for 33,495 (~86%). A huge undertaking! Now that the data is assembled I cannot wait to get to tackling a whole host of analyses.
