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Reposted by Lizzy Steell

Alberta Claw @albertonykus.bsky.social · 1d

New possible Miocene bowerbird from New Zealand, Aeviperditus gracilis: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Congratulations, @lizzysteell.bsky.social! 🪶🧪

Fossilized foot bone of an extinct songbird, shown in multiple views.

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Alberta Claw @albertonykus.bsky.social · Aug 28

What did we find? Closely related birds don’t always have particularly similar wing bones—in fact, the avian wing skeleton seems to be exceptionally prone to convergent evolution, perhaps due to repeated adaptations to similar functional requirements (like flight style)! 🪶🧪

Bar chart comparing levels of convergent evolution inferred from different anatomical datasets on birds. The dataset for the "present" study exhibits the highest levels of convergent evolution.

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Alberta Claw @albertonykus.bsky.social · Aug 28

It's been online for a month but now in final format: a new paper I'm on is out today! We analyzed over 200 features from the bird wing and shoulder girdle skeleton to see how they're distributed across the bird family tree. academic.oup.com/iob/advance-... 🪶🧪 (📷 @fieldpalaeo.bsky.social)

Photo of a mostly white duck (male common pochard) with a rufous brown head and dark neck. It is leaning back on the surface of the water with its wings raised.

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Lizzy Steell @lizzysteell.bsky.social · Jun 14

A happy afternoon practicing some warbler photography in @rspb.bsky.social Fen Drayton 😊

A photo of a sedge warbler singing, perching in some dead twigs with a dark green background

A reed warbler perches amongst the reeds and peeks out

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Stu Butchart @stubutchart.bsky.social · Jun 11

We've just launched AviList! - the new unified global taxonomic checklist for the world's birds, developed through the Working Group on Avian Classification, including BirdLife, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, IOC and others @birdlifeglobal.bsky.social @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social www.avilist.org

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Joschua Knüppe @joschuaknuppe.bsky.social · Jun 9

There is no tomorrow for Moa kind.
In this result of yesterdays #paleostream we explore the Holocene of New Zealand, a world we largely lost not even 1000 years ago.

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The Palaeoverse Community @palaeoverse.bsky.social · Jun 4

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨

It’s time to announce our Summer 2025 talk schedule 👀
Looking forward to hearing from @spissatella.bsky.social, @sauropodlets.bsky.social, @nmkphylo.bsky.social and @russellgarwood.co.uk!

Sign up here: bit.ly/palaeoverse-lecture-series-2025

A flyer for the Palaeoverse Lecture Series for Summer 2025
June 26th - Dr Katie Collins, Natural History Museum
“Both round and upward: Spiral morphometry and how to compare things that are the same, but different”
July 31st - Summer break
August 28th - Amy Shipley, University of Leeds
“Modelling ancient food webs: ecosystem changes across the Pliocene marine megafaunal extinction”
September 25th - Dr Nicolás Mongiardino Koch, UC San Diego and Dr Russell Garwood, University of Manchester
“The Tree of Life and Death: What do fossil taxa contribute to morphological phylogenetics?”

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Reposted by Lizzy Steell

Fernando Blanco @fernandoblancos.bsky.social · Jun 5

🦏🦣🦌 LARGE paper alert!!! We tracked 60 million years of large herbivore evolution—over 3,000 fossil species—to uncover how ecosystems have changed and reorganized through time. What we found might help us understand the next big tipping point 🧵👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Two major ecological shifts shaped 60 million years of ungulate faunal evolution - Nature Communications

Here, the authors analyze a fossil dataset spanning 60 million years to investigate ecological stability. Their network analysis identifies prolonged stability interrupted by two major functional tran...

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Lizzy Steell

Global Change Biology @globalchangebio.bsky.social · Jun 6

Fitting the Bill in an Urban World: Hummingbird Beak Shape Responds to Anthropogenic Factors

🔗 buff.ly/vAd0H6v
@lizzysteell.bsky.social

buff.ly

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Alberta Claw @albertonykus.bsky.social · May 31

Do you know whether a falcon is more closely related to a parrot or to a pigeon? Test your knowledge in this quiz on bird phylogeny, designed by me: uquiz.com/quiz/0oXJxF/... 🪶🧪

Bird Phylogeny Quiz

Test your knowledge on the evolutionary relationships among birds. Inspired by Dimetrodone's Ultimate Mammal Taxonomy Quiz.

uquiz.com

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Michael Sanders @hummingbird-the.bsky.social · May 31

For #worldparrotday, here's a gorgeous kea I met at Arthur's Pass, New Zealand, this March. What a stunner! 🦜😍🐦🪶 #birds #birdphotography

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Anna Frances Probert @afprobert.bsky.social · May 26

Two academic (lecturer) positions available at the University of Otago in Aotearoa/New Zealand! One in Conservation Biology, another in Evolutionary Ecology. Links for positions below:
otago.taleo.net/careersectio...
otago.taleo.net/careersectio...

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Field Palaeobiology Research Group @fieldpalaeo.bsky.social · May 23

Exciting news at Cambridge! We are launching the Darwin-Hamied Centre to promote research at the intersection of biodiversity and economics christs.cam.ac.uk/news/darwin-.... We are advertising two 5-year Senior Research Fellowships—application deadline 22nd June! christs.cam.ac.uk/vacancies-ch...

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Dr Thomas Clements @taphonomist.bsky.social · May 23

Super interesting paper outlining the damaging impact of the 'Gollum effect': researchers who restrict access to resources.

Very relevant to palaeo work regarding the gatekeeping of collection material and the harm this causes to science. Worth a read!

www.cell.com/one-earth/fu...

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Lizzy Steell @lizzysteell.bsky.social · May 23

You can find the main article here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Supplemental Feeding as a Driver of Population Expansion and Morphological Change in Anna's Hummingbirds

Bird beaks are highly adaptable, with the potential to undergo rapid morphological shifts in response to environmental change such as climatic variation or food availability. Anna's Hummingbirds (Cal...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Lizzy Steell @lizzysteell.bsky.social · May 23

Excited to share an invited commentary about the fantastic and ambitious work by @nicmalexandre.bsky.social and colleagues in @globalchangebio.bsky.social on Anna's Hummingbird beaks. It was a joy to write about, congratulations on a super cool study!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Fitting the Bill in an Urban World: Hummingbird Beak Shape Responds to Anthropogenic Factors

Click on the article title to read more.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Nicolas Alexandre @nicmalexandre.bsky.social · May 21

🚨New paper alert!🚨
We show that hummingbird beaks have changed in shape & size since around WWII, driven by the rise of commercialized feeders! 🧵
📄 Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb....
#ornithology #evolution #GlobalChangeBiology

Supplemental Feeding as a Driver of Population Expansion and Morphological Change in Anna's Hummingbirds

Bird beaks are highly adaptable, with the potential to undergo rapid morphological shifts in response to environmental change such as climatic variation or food availability. Anna's Hummingbirds (Cal...

dx.doi.org

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Reposted by Lizzy Steell

Matteo Fabbri @mfabbri.bsky.social · May 21

Glad to share a new paper led by @yara_haridy and @NeilShubin Lab on the early evolution of teeth! Modern and fossil data point at an ancestrally sensorial function for the earliest dentine
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The origin of vertebrate teeth and evolution of sensory exoskeletons - Nature

Re-examination of the presumed Cambrian fossil fish Anatolepis reveals previous misidentification of aglaspidid sensory structures as dentine, a vertebrate sensory tissue, showing it to be a...

www.nature.com

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Matteo Fabbri @mfabbri.bsky.social · May 14

Glad to see the formal description of the Chicago specimen of #Archaeopteryx finally out in @nature.com! Troodontid and early bird features in the palate and evidence of tertiary feathers
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Chicago Archaeopteryx informs on the early evolution of the avian bauplan - Nature

Analysis of the 'Chicago' Archaeopteryx, a nearly complete and uncrushed specimen, reveals details of the skeleton, soft tissues and plumage of this taxon, providing information on the evolution to av...

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Lizzy Steell

Guillermo Navalón @gnavalon.bsky.social · May 14

Congratulations to @lizzysteell.bsky.social
for the publication of her PhD magnum opus🥳🥳🥳New index to evaluate homoplasy in morph. datasets & tons of fun read about the effects of levels of homoplasy in macroevolutionary patterns! #homoplasyisnotdusty #superproud #doseefig6

Lizzy Steell @lizzysteell.bsky.social · May 13

It's finally out! Together with Allison Yi Hsiang and @fieldpalaeo.bsky.social, we explored relative homoplasy in a range of bird matrices and introduce a new parsimony measure, the relative homoplasy index (RHI) (1/n)

academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/a...

Revealing patterns of homoplasy in discrete phylogenetic datasets with a cross-comparable index

Abstract. Investigating patterns of homoplasy can improve our understanding of macroevolutionary processes by revealing evolutionary constraints on morphol

academic.oup.com

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Lizzy Steell @lizzysteell.bsky.social · May 13

You can find all the functions, datasets and developing R code at my Github github.com/LizzySteell/...

Please reach out with issues or suggestions! The code is always under development (one day it might become a package...) (10/10)

GitHub - LizzySteell/Homoplasy: R code for the Relative Homoplasy Index, a method for quantifying homoplasy in discrete phylogenetic datasets

R code for the Relative Homoplasy Index, a method for quantifying homoplasy in discrete phylogenetic datasets - LizzySteell/Homoplasy

github.com

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Lizzy Steell @lizzysteell.bsky.social · May 13

During this work, I wrote a lot of R functions to make discrete morphological matrices more compatible with the R package Phangorn which is designed for molecular data. This includes creating phyDat objects that can accommodate polymorphic state scorings, and more (9/n)

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Lizzy Steell @lizzysteell.bsky.social · May 13

My hope is that homoplasy is explored more deeply in discrete datasets moving forwards using indices such as RHI, but also in conjunction with alternative methods such as visualising in morphospace and character state exhaustion analyses. (8/n)

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Lizzy Steell @lizzysteell.bsky.social · May 13

The patterns we see are as you might expect; clades overlap more in morphospace when homoplasy is high, because the same morphologies (i.e. combinations of character states) have evolved repeatedly. (7/n)

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