Our new pipeline for analysing highly degraded genomic DNA data is now available at biorXiv!

Study led by Bilal Sharif

Check out our study!

Joy Was Never Yours to Have

Dear White Folx,

"Nothing in whiteness teaches you about joy, pleasure, play, and passion that isn't about control, entitlement, or competition. You don't know joy just to be joyful."

I said this on the Yell Fire! podcast recently and I want to sit with it here because it names something...

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

The photo shows a wooden model of a cow giving birth accompanied by two men. One man calms the cow while the other ensures a proper delivery.The calf emerges from his mother, licking the hand of the man.

Models of everyday life were deposited in #Egyptian tombs. They were supposed to support the deceased in the afterlife. One of the most charming examples is the model of a #cow giving birth.
Carved in wood, painted.
Probably from Meir, #Egypt, dating c. 2040-1985 BC.

📷 Royal Ontario Museum
🏺

Complex Patterns of Hitchhiking Mutation Load Among Stickleback Populations. New paper led by Jana Nickel out in GBE @genomebiolevol.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

Can you believe that until now there were more genomes sequenced for the woolly mammoth than for living African elephants?

Today, we bring you the first genomic, continent-scale analyses of 232 high-quality genomes of both species, the savanna and forest elephant.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A vertical, black and white photo of a large sea stack and its reflection in a pool of sea water. An island in the background.

A sea stack.

A new phD position in my lab about amphibian, infection diseases in a global changing world. Check it out! And spread the word ;)

Katja sampling a gorilla skull.

ICP2026 flyer

Meet our keynote speakers 💁‍♂️

KATERINA GUSCHANSKI (@kguschan.bsky.social)

Katerina is expert in using genomics of museum collections to explore primate evolution, conservation genetics, and the historical impact of environmental change.

Conference info & registration 👉 icp2026.palaeogenomics.org

Genomic erosion across avian lineages in the context of their evolutionary history Abstract. Loss of genetic diversity threatens species survival, yet its dynamics and impacts can vary widely across species depending on their evolutionary

Genomic erosion across avian lineages in the context of their evolutionary history
academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

Butterfly Conservation's hairy caterpillars to see in spring & summer: Oak/Northern Eggar, Drinker, Dark Tussock, Vapourer, Emperor Moth, Fox Moth, Wood Tiger. Graphic of a pen and a checklist next to text which reads: "Spotted a hairy caterpillar? Report your sightings via the ‘Peatland Caterpillars Recording Project’ activity on the iRecord app or website: irecord.org.uk" Photo credits: Bob Eade, Russell Gomm, Iain Leach, Mark Parsons

Look out for these seven hairy caterpillars found on our precious peatlands in the North of England 🐛🔍

Spotted a hairy caterpillar? Report your sighting to us through the ‘Peatland Caterpillars Recording Project’ on iRecord 👉 irecord.org.uk/join/peatland-caterpilla...

Seashells Transform Suburban Bathroom Into Tropical Hideaway

Seashells Transform Suburban Bathroom Into Tropical Hideaway theonion.com/seashells-transform-subu...

New preprint! We sequenced 175 'Alalā (Hawaiian crow) genomes to understand why >50% of eggs fail to hatch in a species recovered from just 9 individuals. What we found was a both exciting and surprising. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Tuesday

“I asked ChatGPT”- ok well I asked the mycelium and it said to plant more trees and to tell you to return to the forest

Two archaeologists stand in a trench looking at an unearthed, fossilised, time machine and a tyrannosaurus skull in whose jaws is a human skeleton holding an aerosol can. One says: “These fossils would appear to suggest that, while Professor Cooper's time machine was a great success, his dinosaur repellent formula was not.”

My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com

These amazingly bright colours 😉! Congratulations!

Huzzah! Tomorrow's Sewage Spill Day when the full stats are released on how much was discharged into rivers, lakes and coasts last year. To whet your appetites I’ve mapped the 2025 spills at outfalls affecting bathing waters.
Here are the top 10 worst offenders in reverse order:

Temporal genomics reveals widespread but unexpected consequences of a bottleneck in the Scandinavian brown bear Abstract. After the last ice age, the brown bear (Ursus arctos) recolonized Scandinavia, likely from two different source populations, resulting in two sub

Check out our bear-y cool paper about Scandinavian brown bears published today in Royal Society Open Science!🐻 More about it in the thread🧵 @cpgsthlm.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

Special Issue on Genetic Rescue is out 🎉🎉🎉
The 21 papers on the SI highlight how evolutionary biology can enhance resilience & long-term survival of biodiversity. Introducing genetically diverse individuals can boost fitness in small, isolated populations 🧬🌿

doi.org/10.1111/eva.70225

The northern white rhino is effectively extinct. Can a healthy pop be restored from cryopreserved cells of only 12 inds? @arynwilder.bsky.social et al. show how restoration from biobanked cells eases constraints of a limited founder pool to enable recovery 🦏

📸 San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

It’s always been a mystery to me how the genetic diversity and composition of the Scandinavian brown bear originated 🤔

Today, we publish a new paper that sheds new light on this, and a real-time example of how mito-nuclear discordances can evolve during severe bottlenecks:

doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

The last of the three pioneers of great ape studies has died. Galdikas, Fossey, and Goodall dedicated their lives to understanding the lives of these extraordinary creatures.

As one of the authors of this thought I’d share a bit about how we got here and how you can do what we’ve done at you institution.

Over the two years I’ve been at the University of Edinburgh I’ve grown increasingly concerned by fellow academics uncritically using LLMs, especially OpenAIs’s ChatGPT.

Christina Warinner posing for a picture.

ICO2026 info flyer

Meet our plenary speakers 💁‍♂️

CHRISTINA WARINNER (@harvard.edu)

@christinawarinner.bsky.social investigates ancient microbiomes to reveal insights into the diets and health of past human populations.

Conference info 👉 icp2026.palaeogenomics.org

⚠️ Abstract submission open! (deadline 30th Nov) ⚠️

Meet our plenary speakers 💁‍♂️

JOHANNES KRAUSE (eva.mpg.de)

Johannes' research has made major contributions to our understanding of human pathogens, hominin evolution, and the peopling of Europe.

Conference info 👉 icp2026.palaeogenomics.org

⚠️ Abstract submission open! (deadline 30th Nov) ⚠️

Meet our keynote speakers 💁‍♂️

LUCY VAN DORP (@ugiatucl.bsky.social)

Lucy is a leading expert in ancient microbe research, using ancient DNA to reconstruct the origins, evolution, and spread of major human pathogens throughout history.

Conference info & registration 👉 icp2026.palaeogenomics.org

Your shrinking sense of humor