Another fishy #FluorescenceFriday. Even a simple DAPI (blue-yellow) and actin (red) staining can decorate the zebrafish one-day-old embryo spectacularly! 🐟

From collections to conservation: the indispensable role of natural history museums The IUCN Species Survival Commission has published a Position Statement on the vital role of biological collections in biodiversity conservation iucn.org/news/202607/...

From collections to conservation: the indispensable role of natural history museums

The IUCN Species Survival Commission has published a Position Statement on the vital role of biological collections in biodiversity conservation: a formal acknowledgement that natural history museums,...

iucn.org

New preprints! 1/3 Spider venom glands are modified salivary glands which have recruited appendage and myogenic programs from other the developmental programs of other organs. Led by Giulia Zancolli, with @yehumoran.bsky.social doi.org/10.64898/202...

Thrilled to have my first thesis chapter published in @currentbiology.bsky.social! We combine genomics, gene editing, and performance experiments to reveal the genetic basis and functional consequences of hurricane-induced trait shifts in island lizards! Check it out: www.cell.com/current-biol...

Genomic targets of hurricane-induced selection on clinging performance in an island lizard

Vaughn et al. show that hurricanes drive parallel genomic selection signatures in island anoles. One candidate locus (hs6st1) is associated with rear toe length. CRISPR disruption reduces hindfoot ele...

cell.com

#DBfeature 🐠 Pax9 has a broader role in initiating development of mesenchymal structures around the mouth during zebrafish development By Sandhya Paudel, Sarah McLeod, Stefani Gjorcheska, Lindsey Barske tinyurl.com/yc3jfpux

Swept ashore: Transoceanic dispersals and the biogeographic origins of Australian gekkonid lizards doi.org/10.32942/X26...

Historical Perspective: Sridhar et al. use the backstories of famous scientific papers in Ecology and Evolution to uncover the background roles of natural history that are written out of papers. Available now ahead of print! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

⁉️ Dear Colleagues: What platforms are you using in your labs using to easily share #code, help students on lab data analyses, and centralize access to pipelines? We do a mix of #bioinformatics and #statistical analyses, using R and other pipelines. We have a linux machine. #Github? #rstudio? THX!!

Tiny Chameleons! By looking at gene family evolution in two South African dwarf chameleons with contrasting forested vs open-canopy habitats, researchers revealed habitat-specific lineages differ in the functional categories genes display across families! doi.org/10.1093/evol... 🌍🧪👇

Are there grants to support small natural history/teaching collections? A little would go a long way to securing some valuable specimens we have at this PUI. But the funding landscape keeps shifting - any leads appreciated! #museum #naturalhistory #ornithology #PUI

#JMIH26 is just a little over a week away. If you're attending, be sure to check out the symposium @danpaluh.bsky.social and I organized celebrating the career and legacy of Aaron Bauer! It will be filled with amazing talks about geckos, snakes, skinks, and more!

Female #hummingbirds dress like males to escape aggressive behavior! 🤯 Read more in my latest blog post for Beaks & Bones: 🪶🧪 beaksandbones.substack.com/p/male-looki... Original study by @jjinsing.bsky.social et al.: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... #birds #ornithology #science #scicomm

Why do some female hummingbirds look like males?

Male-like plumage helps female hummingbirds escape social harassment.

beaksandbones.substack.com

Excited that the first paper from my dissertation is now out in Royal Society Open Science! @royalsociety.org We used PGLS to investigate the effect of brain size and metabolism on reproductive output across extant amniotes and dinosaurs 🧵 #FossilFriday royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

Awesome new pre-print: @brennian.bsky.social and company back at it with the most glorious figures about glorious limb-reduced geckos. doi.org/10.64898/202...

Alligator embryology on deck! @stephlechki.bsky.social @lnwilson.bsky.social @griffinlabpaleo.bsky.social

The Brock Lab is hiring a postdoc to help us study sensory ecology and sexual selection in urban reptiles! 🐍🦎🌆 Comes with a $5K travel stipend. App closes July 1! careers-sdsurf.icims.com/jobs/20539/p...

Excited to share the final published version of our work on the evolution of dorsal-ventral patterning in fins and limbs, now up on @currentbiology.bsky.social In review we added new single LARM element deletions to assess their impact on dorsality. Take a look! 🔬🧪🐟🐁 www.cell.com/current-biol...

M. Brent Hawkins@homeobox.bsky.social · last yr.

We take for granted that our hands have two sides and can articulate in an endless number of ways. But what about a fish’s fin? Can a fish know something “like the back of its fin,” or have its future told with a fin palm reading? Check out this bluetorial to find out 👇🧪🧬🐟 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

8 hours. That’s all fish need to heal wounds 🐟⏱️ Why are they so fast compared to humans? I break down the science of rapid regeneration in a microscopy story 🔬 Watch here: youtu.be/Mt9f61adaP0 #FluorescenceFriday #Microscopy

"Right now, in some underfunded lab, a scientist is chasing a question that sounds pointless.... No one can say if they will succeed. But a century of experience says that funding people to do this work is a good bet. If we stop making that bet, we will pay for it in cures no one will know to miss."

Opinion | The Science That Turned Lizard Venom Into GLP-1s Is Under Attack

nytimes.com

New in @science.org ...since our first discoveries of early tetrapods, they have been thought of as "amphibians" characterized by aquatic larvae. But is this true? For the first time, we report exceptional fossils of stem tetrapod babies that upend this paradigm. 1/n www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Direct development of stem tetrapods across the fin-to-limb transition

Modern amphibians are characterized by an aquatic larval stage that ends abruptly with a period of widespread tissue remodeling (metamorphosis) upon transition to terrestrial adulthood. A transient la...

science.org

Cranial soft tissues scale non-uniformly in geckos, a group w/extensive body-size variation. DiceCT, μCT & phylogenetic comparative methods revealed negative brain allometry, positive allometry of jaw adductors & variable eye scaling. Lagorio et al anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Ever wondered what impact climate may have had on dinosaur body size? Us too! 🧵 Check out our new paper that tries to answer just that—out today in Palaeontology! @thepalass.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Body size evolution through shifting climatic conditions in Mesozoic dinosaurs

Body size evolution is commonly associated with climate change. For example, birds and mammals have been found to decrease in size with anthropogenic global warming. Recent studies have inferred dist...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

✨Rare model organisms can teach us how to build a body differently. In snail embryos blastomeres can be as big as the rest of the embryo! 🐌Phrontis vibex blastula stained for tubulin (gray), phalloidin (blue) and histone (magenta). 🔬 #ModelMonday #DevBio 📸: Clemens Cabernard

Interested in #macroevolution, #macroecology, and mountain biodiversity? I'm recruiting a #postdoc for an NSF-funded project at Yale, in collaboration with Martha Muñoz (Yale) and Maya Stokes (Florida State University). I'll be at #Evol2026 and happy to chat! Link below

Very happy to announce that I will be continuing my #snake research as an Assistant Professor at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania Fall 2026! This is the start of the SERPNT Lab! 🐍 Thank you to the huge number of individuals that have made this possible!

recruiting a couple new grad students to start in january, please share! www.gilbertecology.com/opportunities

If you are around Chicago on June 16th, come have a beer and learn about the evolution and development of sexual diversity.

New paper! Evolution of barriers to gene flow in rattlesnake speciation. Congrats to Keaka, Drew, and a big list of awesome collaborators! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The Pacific spiny lumpsucker, an inefficient swimmer but a highly efficient suction cup. The pelvic fins have evolved into a strong suction disk on the belly, giving it the ability to anchor itself to substrates. Plate-like structures called "tubercles" provide defense against predators.

Don't miss the May issue of Evolution: academic.oup.com/evolut/issue... On the cover: "Embryology reveals a morphological signature of ancestral diurnality maintained in a nocturnal lineage" by Aaron H Griffing et al. academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...

Volume 80 Issue 5 | Evolution | Oxford Academic

Evolution, the official journal of the Society for the Study of Evolution™, publishes articles in all areas of evolutionary biology focused on broadening...

academic.oup.com