Catherine Sheard

Job Opportunity at University of Leeds: Associate Professor of Plant Science Associate Professor of Plant Science Salary: Grade 9 (£61,759 - £73,708 p.a, depending on experience)This role will be based on the university campus, with scope for elements of the job to be undertak...

Very excited to announce that we are hiring for three faculty positions at @universityofleeds.bsky.social in @bioscienceleeds.bsky.social: A/Prof Plant Science, A/Prof Animal Biology and Lecturer in Ecology, Zoology, Biodiversity or Ecosystem Management. Please do get in touch to chat. Links below:

Many brightly colored pinned moth specimens in an Entomology collection.

Undergrad and graduate students! Could your work benefit from visiting one of the NHMLAC’s collections? Apply for our Collections Study Award, due Apr. 1. I’d love to have students make use of our Entomology collection!

Details here:
tinyurl.com/bdduefsy

Ancient DNA and spatial modeling reveal a pre-Inca trans-Andean parrot trade - Nature Communications Here, the authors combine ancient DNA, stable isotopes, and computational modeling to study colorful feathers from a pre-Incan tomb in Peru. They identify four species of parrots, which were likely ca...

🦜🏔️ How did vibrant Amazonian parrot feathers end up in a desert tomb on the Pacific coast of Peru 1,000 years ago? Our new paper on @natcomms.nature.com reveals they didn't just trade feathers, pre-Inca societies transported live macaws and parrots across the Andes!👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"The ethical risks of open-access agreements being used for authorship leverage" <- yeah, no kidding 🫠

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This is so heartbreaking, and also I am going to make my PSA again.

Babies can be vaccinated against measles as young as six months, it’s just not standard. It’s usually only recommended for international travel in the US. But guess what? We’re the plague pit now.

Pete Hegseth Blew Billions on Fruit Basket Stands, Chairs, and Crab The Defense Department went on a $93 billion spending spree in 2025.

As millions of Americans were losing their SNAP benefits the Pentagon spent:

🔹️$6.9 million worth of lobster tails🦞
🔹️$15.1 million for ribeye steak 🥩
🔹️$2 million for Alaskan king crab 🦀
🔹️ and even $98,329 on a Steinway & Sons grand piano

✏️ by @newrepublic.com

The Pokémon Company Is Actively Recruiting PhD Holders With Backgrounds in Ecology to Work in Tokyo - IGN The Pokémon Company is actively recruiting PhD holders with backgrounds in ecology to work in Tokyo. This is perhaps the closest chance Pokémon fans have to channel their inner Professor Oak in real l...

This could be your dream job!
PhD in ecology, and English and Japanese language skills required... working for POKEMON!!!

www.ign.com/articles/the...

3-year Independent Post-doc in Animal Behavior based at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama!

Three positions, each including salary & a research budget.

Applications due April, 15th.

DM if you are interesting in developing a project with us!

stri.si.edu/academic-pro...

I give that paper to my students -- it's great!!!

The internet, on scientists: They're secretive gatekeepers, they hoard esoterica/the truth, they don't want anyone in their ivory tower little clubs

Actual scientists: LOOK, WE FOUND A 300 MILLION YEAR OLD FOSSILIZED CLOACCAL IMPRESSION AND THE VENT IS HORIZONTAL! PLZ READ MY 67-PAGE PAPER ABOUT IT

if you're wondering what this means for the water situation this year, the answer involves a lot of hyperventilating

Our PhD opportunity is still open. A match-funded project with @chesterzoo.bsky.social, where the student will also be a Conservation Scholar. An exciting interdisciplinary project that can be tailored to the student. Even the pigeons are interested in our LiDAR scanner!

I'm just an academic editor, BEGGING the new Wiley software to flag when potential reviewers are in fact manuscript authors.

(With apologies to author 34ish of this 70ish person manuscript, who just got invited to review her own paper.)

It's 2026.

Puberty blockers have been banned on the basis of a fake study conducted by a generalist paeditrician.

Hormones for under 18s have been banned on the basis of a fake review conducted by a head injury specialist.

Both remain available for cis kids because that's 'different' somehow

Yes, that, exactly!

Screenshot of the EGI seminars You-tube Channel

We've uploaded recordings of many of our seminars over the last few months to our You-tube channel, including from @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social, Kristen Ruegg, Daniel Field, @jon-slate.bsky.social, Paul Acker, @thelabandfield.bsky.social & @kokkonut.bsky.social - Enjoy!

www.youtube.com/@EGIOxford

Shared from my PhD lab’s WhasApp chat, how a journal published a paper about the Arctic fox which is 100% an AI hallucination, and journal isn’t retracting it.

www.canids.org/resources/Le...

Damn depressing how fake science and AI is increasingly flooding real science and real work.

There is No Consensus on Biological Sex At this critical moment when misinformation about sex is being applied to policy globally, scientific clarification on the definition of biological sex is valuable. Here, we evaluate the primary appr...

New paper out in ecology letters! with @andylee.bsky.social @allydefduf.bsky.social

We synthesized the active debate on how scientists define sex, including limitations and assumptions. We believe this discussion will lead to more accurate science.

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

📢 Including fossil tips in your phylogeny can double your continuous trait model fitting accuracy!

Updated preprint out now on @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social.

🔗 doi.org/10.32942/X27...

with @pedrolgodoy.bsky.social @macroecoevoale.bsky.social and @bethanyjallen.bsky.social

Amazing 🪿📖

10/10, no notes, incredible 😂

I love attempting to decipher my Notes app.

"Koblenz"
"Rates of evolution"
"Birds in Scotland"

Past!Catherine, wtf 😂

We know that marine fishes 🐠 have an inverse gradient of speciation compared to that of spp richness, with higher speciation at higher latitudes. But, what about freshwater 🐟?

Find out in the new PhD paper by Juliana Herrera-Pérez and friends (not just colleagues) 🤿 👇

shorturl.at/zgKfA

No Evidence for Pace of Life Evolution Along Elevational Gradients in Squamate Reptiles Ecological conditions can significantly influence the trade-off between survival, growth, and reproduction, leading to evolutionary divergence in life-history traits among populations experiencing di...

No Evidence for Pace of Life Evolution Along Elevational Gradients in Squamate Reptiles | Sahlean & Martin, 2026 | Ecology Letters

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

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...

Well damn, this is cool.

Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre-Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea | Chia et al., 2026 | Ecology Letters

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Uniqueness and predictability in evolution and the history of mollusks | PNAS Evolution is a historical process whose trajectories are determined in part by the introduction of new phenotypes. Although most phenotypes have ev...

Uniqueness and predictability in evolution and the history of mollusks | Vermeij & Thomson, 2026 | PNAS

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

That's very kind of you, thank you!

Black Death Land Abandonment Drove European Diversity Losses Our analyses reveal rapid declines in floristic diversity at timescales coincident with the Black Death depopulation event, followed by a diversity rebound over subsequent centuries that mirrored the...

Black Death Land Abandonment Drove European Diversity Losses | Gordon et al. 2026 | Ecology Letters

Woah.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Wealthy Dubai residents race back to UAE to avoid tax bills Some risk spending too few days in the emirate and too many in the UK

Tax exiles stuck in London desperately trying to get *back* to Dubai to avoid becoming tax resident in the UK? Just great stuff. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

📑📊We have just uploaded a new pre-print where we decompose spatial, temporal and spatial-temporal variation in natural selection on reproductive traits for great tits and blue tits.
With Yimen Araya-Ajoy, @ellafcole.bsky.social and @sheldonbirds.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...