A new analysis in Science of more than 116,000 bird songs has revealed that the astonishing variety of passerine birdsong is built from just eight basic acoustic motifs, like trills, whistles, and harmonic notes. https://scim.ag/4ft2KBF

The global biogeography of passerine songs

Although bird songs are classic models for understanding the evolution of vocal communication, their global diversity has long made the development of a unifying framework challenging. By analyzing th...

scim.ag

I like it when the title makes the message super clear: Temperate local extinctions from climate change are outpacing tropical extinctions. ​(even if the message mostly sucks). 🧪 Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-026-02669-y​

Ray-finned fishes are famously diverse, but we know little about their brains or cranial endocasts. @rodrigoichthys.bsky.social opens this black box with a dice-CT survey of 86 species across the actinopt tree of life. #OA in @royalsocietypublishing.org 🐟🧠 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

New paper out! doi.org/10.1073/pnas... We examined how historical legacies of evolution history, environmental dynamics, and past species losses have shaped today's mammal food webs 🐅🐆🦁 🦌🦓🐗across the globe. #MammalFoodweb #DietaryNiche #Extinction #MacroEcoEvo #EcologicalNetwork

Giants that vanished 10,000 years ago triggered ripple effects that are still felt today, and here’s where

Between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, many of the world’s largest mammals disappeared. Picture creatures like saber-toothed cats with 7-inch fangs and elephant-sized sloths. A new study reveals h...

eurekalert.org

🚨NEW SCIENCE ALERT!🚨Read our new, open-access publication in Scientific Reports (@nature.com) describing #biofluorescence in #cassowary casques! Very excited to unveil this after keeping it secret for 5 years⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41... NYITCOM @akiopteryx.bsky.social @jonathanberman.bsky.social

One of the most-viewed PNAS articles in the last week is “Nudibranch color diversity shares a common physical basis in guanine photonic structure ‘pixels’.” Explore the article here: https://ow.ly/7ph150YyTr1 For more trending articles, visit https://ow.ly/THOS50YyTr2.

High resolution US groundwater map! Ma et al. (2026) www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Princeton University@princeton.edu · 6mo ago

"You always think the closest water is like a lake or a river or stream, but the closest water is beneath your feet." Princeton's @reedh2o.bsky.social talks about new research that maps out groundwater below the surface — a vital tool during times of drought.

The "birds that don't exist" paper is out in Ecology Letters! 🍻 We found a viable body form that has never evolved in a big clade of songbirds, and tested a series of hypotheses to figure out why. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre‐Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea

We use topological data analysis to reveal a persistent morphological gap in a major group of songbirds (superfamily Passeroidea). The gap remained unoccupied for millions of years, even though nearb...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Why is there such variation in the birds encountered as you go up or down a mountain? New paper in #ScienceAdvances examines how climate and ecological interactions drive bird distributions in mountains throughout the year: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 1/10 ⬇️

Climate, ecological dynamics, and the seasonal distribution of birds in mountains

Ecological dynamics related to energy use and competition drives the seasonal distribution of birds in mountains across the world.

science.org

Sternum (breastbone) morphology supports long-distance flight capabilities in Lithornis, an early member of the paleognath (ostrich, emu, etc.) lineage: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... Congratulations to @tyrannosaura.bsky.social! 🪶🧪

Our group analyzed 1,200+ GPS-tracked wild cats and dogs and found that wild dogs rely more on reused routes than wild cats. Born as Bill’s Covid lockdown idea--emailing data owners around the world--now finally out! Glad to have contributed to this tremendous effort. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2401042122

📢🦋 Our paper ‘Global selection on insect antipredator coloration’ is out and featured on the cover of @science.org We ran a huge experiment to find out how ecological context favours camouflage and warning colouration as antipredator strategies. 1/6 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very proud of this paper in BioScience : « Too cute to be wild: what teddy bears reveal about our disconnection from nature » 🧸 are more than toys, they shape among our first emotional connections to nature. But their design may also distort how we see wildlife ! 👉 doi.org/10.1093/bios... 🧪🦤