Michael Matschiner

Comic. [2x2 chart. Top left quadrant: seem like dinosaurs x are dinosaurs. Silhouettes of dinosaurs stegosaurus, triceratops, tyrannosaurus, velociraptor, and long-neck dinosaur. Top right quadrant: seem like dinosaurs x are not dinosaurs. Silhouettes of mosasaur, quetzalcoatlus, dimetrodon, plesiosaur, and pteranodon. Bottom left quadrant: don’t seem like dinosaurs x are dinosaurs. Silhouettes of penguin, egret, ostrich, pigeon, falcon. Bottom right: don’t seem like dinosaurs x are not dinosaurs. Silhouettes of squirrel, stapler, plant, person, and bicycle.]

Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs

xkcd.com/3204/

Only ~3 weeks left to submit abstracts to the @scar-antarctic.bsky.social meeting in Oslo! Come present your work on Antarctic and/or sub-Antarctic fish evolution in session#21 convened by @mmatschiner.bsky.social, Julia York, Jin-Hyoung Kim, and myself!
All the fishes are welcome!❤️🐟🧪🌎🇦🇶
scar2026.org

Reptile Handler At Birthday Party Ruthlessly Heckled By 6-Year-Old For Showing Amphibian

Reptile Handler At Birthday Party Ruthlessly Heckled By 6-Year-Old For Showing Amphibian https://theonion.com/reptile-handler-at-birthday-party-ruthlessly-heckled-by-6-year-old-for-showing-amphibian/

Charley Harper, "Darwin's Finches", from "The Giant Golden Book of Biology", 1961

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

DDLS Research School Postdoc call 2026 Call for Academic and Industrial Postdoctoral Fellowships in Data-Driven Life Science 2026 Generic Description of the DDLS Postdoc Program The SciLifeLab and Wallenberg National Program for Data-Drive...

Hit me up if you'd like to apply to a Data-driven postdoc fellowship with me in Sweden. 2 year salary, excellent community. Deadline March 31. I have a project idea on reference bias vs pangenome, but keen on hearing ideas. Please share broadly.

www.scilifelab.se/data-driven/...

I am looking for a postdoc to develop high-performance algorithms in computational genomics. Email or DM me if interested. For more information, see hlilab.github.io/vacancies. RTs appreciated!

We’re so used to conflicting phylogenetic results that we tend to shrug shoulders. Nice to see how @caseywdunn.bsky.social digs into one such conflict, finds the issue, and resolves it. Bravo!

Please repost: 🚨Field assistant position 🐧

We offer a 14-months field assistant position through the French Polar Institute to work on king penguin ecophysiology and behavioral ecology.

Requirements: EU citizen < 30yo having experience with harsh fieldwork & wild bird/mammal handling/sampling.

Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Biodiversity The Department of Biology was established in 2010 through the merger of the Departments of Ecology, Cell and Organism Biology, Biological Undergraduate Education, and the Biological Museums. The depar

Come and join me and my colleagues at the Department of Biology, #LundUniversity in #sweden! We have am open position as Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Biodiversity.

Apply here no later than February 11 2026:

https://lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:848749/type:job/where:4/apply:1

Adaptive spread of a sexually selected syndrome eliminates an ancient color polymorphism in wall lizards Genetically determined color morphs are found in many animals. Polymorphism can be maintained by social selection if competitive interactions allow each morph to increase in frequency when rare. This ...

Great new study about the loss of a colour morph in Common Wall Lizards (Podarcis muralis)

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

NEW JOB in #ornithology with @vogelwarte.bsky.social to unravel the demographic drivers of population change in Alpine #swifts in #Switzerland: buff.ly/crV1rT8

Size of Life From an amoeba to a blue whale

and the winner of the "2025 best thing on Internet" has just arrived
neal.fun/size-of-life/

@carlbergstrom.com

The long-term evolutionary potential of four yeast species and their hybrids in extreme temperature conditions Abstract. Accelerating climate change and extreme temperatures urge us to better understand the potential of populations to tolerate and adapt to thermal c

Check our last paper, where we explore how interspecific hybridization can facilitate adaptation to novel environments. @stelkens.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1093/evol...

What are the good free LIMS these days used by molecular labs? We mainly need to link specimen and sample information.

Hemoglobin-Gene Cluster Deletions in Antarctic White-Blooded Icefishes Facilitated by Transposable Elements Abstract. Vertebrates transport oxygen throughout the body bound to hemoglobin packed in red blood cells. Antarctic icefishes are evolutionary oddities wit

We recently published a follow up in a new article published in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social about the hemoglobin gene cluster deletions in the icefish ancestor. We show that each deletion involve different mechanisms and that transposons fueled these deletions!
🐟🧪🌎🧊🇦🇶
academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

Very excited to share that our latest paper is out in Science! We show that the type specimen of Nanotyrannus—an isolated skull—is fully grown, showing that it is not a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex but a distinct species (1/12)
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Check out our cover article by @timjanicke.bsky.social and colleagues about the role of sexual selection in animal speciation. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic.... The beautiful illustration is by Katharina Bóth.

Come tell us about your cool new evolutionary work on Antartic (and/or sub-Antarctic) fishes! It doesn't have to be notothenioids, we love all the fishes (and Evolution)!!
🧪🌎🐟🧊🇦🇶
@scar-antarctic.bsky.social
@usscar-antarctic.bsky.social

A close-up image of a gar's ganoid scales

A unique feature of gars is those distinctive armor-like scales! Unlike a typical fish’s overlapping scales, gars have interlocking “ganoid” scales that are made up of a material similar to the enamel on our teeth. The name “Lepisosteus” even means “bony scale” 🦴 #25DaysofFishmas

Neural posterior estimation for population genetics Simulation-based inference methods are increasingly being used in population genetics due to their flexibility and ability to be applied in settings where likelihood-based methods are intractable. Per...

Popgen folks, Jiseon, Nate, and Andy, along with Yuxin Ning and Franz Baumdicker, just released a really cool new method for simulation based inference (think ABC) using normalizing flows. It seems to work really well! full joint posteriors ftw!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A Sailfin Plunderfish (Histiodraco velifer)

Hi Team Fish, we (@notothentoma.bsky.social, Julia York, and Jin-Hyoung Kim) are organizing a session on Antarctic Fish Evolution at SCAR 2026 in Oslo: scar2026.org
Submit your abstract by 28 February, and join us in beautiful Oslo 8–19 August!
(Photo: Armin Maywald / Alamy)

Four photographs of a ground-dwelling, somewhat partridge-like bird on a forest floor. The bird is mostly brownish in color, with a dark gray "mask" over its eyes and the top of its head.

New species of tinamou, the slaty-masked tinamou (Tinamus resonans): mapress.com/zt/article/v... 🪶🧪 (📷Luis A. Morais)

Figure 1 from a paper published in Nature (linked in post). The figure purports to be an infographic depiction of the "Overall working of the framework" for 'explainably' diagnosing autism spectrum disorder. The infographic is plainly nonsense, containing many spelling errors, nonsense words, meaningless images and graphs. Clearly created using generative AI and (crucially) NEVER CHECKED AT ANY STEP OF THE WRITING OR PUBLICATION PROCESS.

Hey @nature.com, have you got an explanation for how the hell THIS happened? & especially why you accepted a paper with such a bizarre piece of genAI slop in it?!
& more to the point, why we should take you seriously at all going forward?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Credit card fraud Black neon tetras committed credit card fraud during a 2023 livestream by "Mutekimaru Channel" on YouTube. The owner was using motion-tracking software to turn the fish's movements into Nintendo Switch inputs, letting them "play" video games. 8 In 2020, the fish beat Pokemon Sapphire after 3,195 hours, a feat that takes about 30 hours for a typical human. 9/ 181 On January 14, 2023, Pokémon Violet crashed at 1,144 hours, giving the fish free access to the main menu. They entered inputs that opened Nintendo eShop, added 500 yen ($3.85 USD) to their owner's account, and exposed his credit card details on the livestream. 10) 11) Mutekimaru later requested a refund of the 500 yen from Nintendo. l12) "Fish eagerly read the terms and conditions. Many of us humans don't read the terms of service, but fish are smarter than we are" - caption from Mutekimaru in a video about the incident 12) The fish also downloaded an N64 emulator, set up PayPal, used reward points to buy an avatar, and changed Mutekimaru's Nintendo account name to "ROWAWAWA*". 13, After about seven hours, their movements shut down the Switch. 14)

Fish have committed credit card fraud

Open position at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics:
We are looking for a Director of the Center of Pathogen Bioinformatics
apply.refline.ch/499599/0346/...
I am in the Center's steering board together with fantastic colleagues (Emma Hodcroft @firefoxx66.bsky.social, Richard Neher @neher.io, and

Picture of MEME students on the beach

Do you want to do a Masters in Evolutionary Biology? The call for applying to the MEME program is now open! MEME is a fantastic 2-year MSc between four European Universities on all areas of Evolutionary Biology. Apply and study in Sweden/France/the Netherlands/Germany/USA/Switzerland! www.evobio.eu

MBE | Temperature and Pressure Shaped the Evolution of Antifreeze Proteins in Polar and Deep Sea Zoarcoid Fishes A graphic visualizing the finding by Bogan et al. that antifreeze protein (AFP) genes increased in copy number among shallow-water, polar species of Zoarcoidei fishes. Top left: Pholis gunnellus photographed by Chris Isaacs (CC-BY-NC). Top right: Cebidichthys violaceus photographed by Alex Heyman (CC0 1.0). Bottom left: Lycenchelys sp. photographed by Julien Savoie (CC BY 4.0). Bottom right: Lycodes sp. photographed by Julien Savoie (CC BY 4.0).

@snbogan.bsky.social @notothentoma.bsky.social @scotthotaling.bsky.social @paulbfrandsen.bsky.social et al. explore the evolution of type III antifreeze proteins in deep sea zoarcoid fishes.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf219

#evobio #molbio

GBE | Hemoglobin-Gene Cluster Deletions in Antarctic White-Blooded Icefishes Facilitated by Transposable Elements Analyzing numerous genome assemblies of notothenioid fishes, Desvignes et al. demonstrated that in Antarctic white-blooded icefishes, the only vertebrates living without hemoglobin, the two hemoglobin gene clusters were lost independently from one another by different genomic mechanisms, although both mechanisms incriminate transposable and repeat-like elements.

@notothentoma.bsky.social @arcolon14.bsky.social & @jpostlethwait.bsky.social show how Antarctic white-blooded icefishes, the only vertebrates without hemoglobin, independently lost hemoglobin cluster genes, driven by TEs and repeats.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf184

#genome #evolution #TEsky

A mosaic of modular variation at a single gene underpins convergent plumage coloration The reshuffling of genomic variation from multiple origins is an important contributor to phenotypic diversification, yet insights into the evolutionary trajectories of this combinatorial process and ...

1/9 New in @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado8005
How does genetic architecture constrain evolutionary trajectories? To address this question, we inferred the genetic architecture of convergent plumage coloration and its evolutionary history in wheatears.