Tom Near

Phylogenetic hypotheses for Cypriniformes. (a) A phylogenomic study using 219 loci and 172 species; (b) phylogenetic study based on six nuclear loci and using 81 species

Biodiversity, Systematics, and Taxonomy of Ostariophysi (Osteichthyes, Actinopterygii): What We Know Today After Three Decades of Integration of Morphological and Molecular Data.🐟🧪

mdpi.com/2673-6500/5/...

A job ad with multiple images, including the exterior of the museum, a view of collections (jars on shelves), and pictures of some cool, tropical fish but I don't know enough about fish to describe them other than to say they're pretty colors of yellow and blue/green

🚨We're hiring! The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is seeking a tenure-track split position as Assistant Curator of Ichthyology and Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences. Please retweet & share with colleagues! 🐟🐠🧪

Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/174674

Another fish gig!

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?”
A.I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

Climate Resilience: Securing Systems, Sustaining Lives The planet faces intensifying environmental and economic pressures, with extreme weather events escalating and ecosystem degradation impacting the well-being of 3.2 billion people. Join this session...

Yale EEB Prof. Martha Muñoz presenting at the World Economic Forum!

www.weforum.org/meetings/sus...

YouTube video by Sweeshi_17 Saybrook Szn⚡️ - Yale IMs

Pretty stellar "I have a great job" moment...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1fZ...

Play them "Gates of Steel" on 11!

Bryophytes hold a larger gene family space than vascular plants - Nature Genetics A super-pangenome analysis incorporating 123 newly sequenced bryophyte genomes reveals that bryophytes exhibit a larger number of unique and lineage-specific gene families than vascular plants.

Very important paper and resource. Bryophyte genomes expanded by one order of magnitude. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Check out our new preprint! We compare sequence versus synteny approaches for resolving a challenging #phylogenetic problem. In this case, synteny is far more informative! Also includes the first chromosome-level #genome for the enigmatic #fish family Gyrinocheilidae. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

I almost starting whooping and hollering during weekly departmental seminar...great talk but I was following the game on my phone!

Dark gray poster with a red floral border. Text reads: “BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA, Donald R. Kaplan Dissertation Award in Comparative Morphology, 2025 Recipients.” Centered is a portrait of Oluwatobi Oso, smiling outdoors in a tan coat, Yale University. Below, under “Honorable Mention,” is a smaller portrait of Christopher Joaquín Muñoz, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, with text: “The University of Texas at El Paso.” BSA logo in bottom corner.

🌹Congratulations to Oluwatobi Oso of Yale University, winner of the 2025 Donald R. Kaplan Dissertation Award in Comparative Morphology.

Honorable mention:
Christopher Joaquín Muñoz (The University of Texas at El Paso).

botany.org/home/awards/...

#BSA2025AwardsBlitz #IamaBotanist

Rapid Divergence of Visual Systems and Signaling Traits to Contrasting Light Regimes During Early Speciation of African Crater Lake Cichlid Fish Abstract. Sensory adaptation is widely hypothesized to drive ecological speciation, yet empirical evidence from natural populations undergoing early stage

Very proud of this extremely collaborative piece: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
Here, we show that divergence in visual systems - in response to differences in the light environment - leads to rapid divergence in sexually selected colour traits. Work brilliantly led by Madeleine Carruthers. 🐟👀🎨

Multicolored CT model of a fossil cichlid skeleton. Image credit: Austin Babut (project technician).

Do you like cichlids? Fossils? Fossil cichlids? Would you like to study them as part of a graduate degree at the University of Michigan, joining an NSF-funded project? Get in touch.

Hybridization and introgression are major evolutionary processes. Since the 1940s, the prevailing view has been that they shape plants far more than animals. In our new study (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
), we find the opposite: animals exchange genes more, and for longer, than plants

A New, ‘Adorable’ Deep-Sea Fish Swims Into View

The bumpy snailfish, discovered 10,000 feet down off the coast of California, shows that not all denizens of the abyss are frightening. (I watched the video more than 10 times.)

My latest for @nytimes.com (gift link!)

#marinelife

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/s...

Evolutionary age correlates with range size across plants and animals - Nature Communications Why are some species widespread while others are found only in small, isolated areas? This study shows that species with narrow ranges, and thus higher extinction risk, are often island-restricted, poor dispersers, and have evolved relatively recently.

Why are some species widespread while others are found only in small, isolated areas? A study in Nature Communications shows that species with narrow ranges, and thus higher extinction risk, are often island-restricted, poor dispersers, and have evolved relatively recently. #evosky 🧪

The Greatest Extinction Event in 66 Million Years? Contextualising Anthropogenic Extinctions Species and ecosystems are changing rapidly in response to human actions, but how does this compare with the deeper past? We review and compare the current extinction event to those over the last 66 ....

Human-driven extinction event not yet the "sixth mass extinction", but is very likely the largest extinction event of the last 66 million yrs. 🌏 🧪

Read about it in our new paper led by @jackhhatfield.bsky.social
and Katie Davis @anthropocenebio.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1111/gcb....

New species alert! A Pascua goby from the Coral Sea. This genus now contains four species. Two from the Eastern Pacific and two from Australia, with more than 5,500km separating them. Lots of fun describing my second new species. #TeamFish #Fish
doi.org/10.3390/fish...

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

Look at this crazy thing!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Researchers discover two new species of bass in Georgia Researchers in Georgia and South Carolina have identified two new species of bass, previously mistaken for the more common redeye bass living in the South.

Colleague Bud Freeman on GPB talking about new species of bass www.gpb.org/news/2025/09...

Macroevolutionary role reversals in the earliest radiation of bony fishes Troyer et al. examine lower jaw evolution in Silurian-Devonian bony fishes and find substantial differences in patterns of morphological disparity, rates of shape evolution, and functional diversity b...

Excited to announce that the 1st paper from my postdoc is now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social ! Using a large dataset of 3D preserved fossils, we explore the diversification of jaws in early bony fishes. 1/15
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Dark ages: Genomic analysis shows how cavefish lost their eyes In a new study, Yale researchers used genomic analysis to show when cavefishes lost their eyes, which provides a method for dating cave systems.

YaleNews coverage on our study of how North American cavefishes lost their eyes...we wanted to channel Kipling's Just So Stories (1902), but the science was good enough! @chasedbrownstein.bsky.social‬ www.nearlab.org

news.yale.edu/2025/08/27/d...

Convergent Evolution in Amblyopsid Cavefishes and the Age of Eastern North American Subterranean Ecosystems Abstract. Genomes provide tools for reconstructing organismal evolution and larger Earth system processes. Although genome sequences have been jointly anal

@chasedbrownstein.bsky.social @tjnear.bsky.social et al. reveal that amblyopsid fishes colonized caves at least four times from ancestors adapted to low-light environments, and use genomic data to infer ages of subterranean ecosystems in N. America.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf185

#evobio #molbio

MY SITE MY SITE

Happy Academic New Year! Near Lab website updated with our newest members!

www.nearlab.org

The irony is that if anyone messed with the USA, Mexico would be first in line to help us...

Not looking at structure plot...no self-respecting biologist would use that for hybrid determination...but rather the triangle plot...simulation after 10K generations with no gene flow btw hybrids and parental species

Would it look like this? From Wiens & Colella 2025

I want to see the GWAS study!

The Impact of Sequencing and Genotyping Errors on Bayesian Analysis of Genomic Data under the Multispecies Coalescent Model Abstract. The multispecies coalescent (MSC) model accounts for genealogical fluctuations across the genome and provides a framework for analyzing genomic d

Ji, Kapli, Flouri & @zihengyang.bsky.social assess the impact of genotyping errors in phylogenomic data on Bayesian inference of species trees, suggesting that it is better to sequence a few samples at high depths over many samples at low depths.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf184

#evobio #molbio

Two new species of Micropterus (Centrarchidae) endemic to Atlantic Slope river drainages in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, U.S.A. | Zootaxa

Aren't they lovely? Congratulations to my great colleague Bud Freeman, this is the culmination of over a decade of work!

www.mapress.com/zt/article/v...