Tiago Simões

Text: The Evolution Exchange, a monthly conversation series from the Society for the Study of Evolution. Outlines of cartoon heads with speech bubbles.

Announcing The Evolution Exchange: a new interview series for the evolutionary biology community! This month, SSE President Dr. Gina Baucom chats with retired NSF Program Officer Dr. Sam Scheiner about federal science funding. www.evolutionsociety.org/the-evolutio...

Society for the Study of Evolution Site description

Today is the last day to apply for the International Travel Stipends to attend #Evol2026 in Cleveland, Ohio in June! Funds can cover registration, transportation, food, and lodging. A budget template is available on the website. @evolmtg.bsky.social www.evolutionsociety.org/content/soci...

Awesome turnout for #ssb2026

BIG FIGHT AT POLAND’S WROCLAW ZOO!!!

You should have come!

All in order for the #SSB2026 meeting in Baton Rouge!

Cryptovaranoides is not a squamate Claims for a Triassic-aged crown lizard merit detailed reanalysis, the results of which find that Cryptovaranoides is not only not a lizard, but is a more distantly related diapsid reptile.

Almost as a small Christmas miracle, our second (and final) response to the supposed presence of varanoids in the Triassic: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
With M. Caldwell, S. Scarpetta, C. Brownstein, D. Meyer, and M. Lee

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

Today we had Simon Scarpetta from USF delivering a talk here at EEB @princeton.edu on the technical and empirical challenges in sorting the phylogenomics and biogeography of iguanas...rafting over 8,000 km from North America to Fiji!

Awesome week meeting with our whole team investigating the genomic basis of phenotypic evolution across all squamates at @princetonupress.bsky.social and @amnh.org with my fellow PIs @marcanthonytollis.bsky.social and Frank Burbrink and all our students and postdocs in this enterprise!

Too big to miss: body size biases in tetrapod species descriptions and their implications for conservation While species descriptions are rooted in biological diversity, their timing and patterns have also been influenced by historical, socioeconomic, and perceptual biases. Among these, body size has long...

Our lab's PhD student Daniel's take on body size biases in tetrapod taxonomy: nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Origin and Early Evolution of Squamates and Their Kin: From Fossils to Genomes Squamates (lizards, including snakes) are the most diverse group of terrestrial vertebrates on Earth today and have an evolutionary history dating back to at least the Middle Triassic (ca. 242 Mya). D...

Our big squamate origins and early evolution review is now fully published as open access! with @marcanthonytollis.bsky.social and F. Burbrink

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Diversification dynamics at scale - Nature Ecology & Evolution A diversification model that integrates phylogenetic and fossil occurrence data reveals diversity-independent and non-adaptively radiating dynamics that govern the rise and fall of plant and animal cl...

and my perspective piece on this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Loss of macroevolutionary species fitness explains the rise and fall of clades - Nature Ecology & Evolution The interplay between speciation and extinction rates shapes clade diversity dynamics. Using a novel phylogenetic model that includes living and fossil lineages, the authors estimate speciation and ex...

Check out this amazing paper by @ignacioq.bsky.social et al. on the rise and fall of clades using a new fossilized birth-death model and inegrating phylogenetic and fossil occurence data.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Another paleo position open: Professor of Practice and Curator in Charge, Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory at UT Austin apply.interfolio.com/175702

Position right next door for vert paleo!
jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/260...

Folks, I am always happy to send papers through research gate...but maybe you wanna avoid the trouble when the papers are open access...just saying

We suggest this is inherent to the very distinct nature of these datatypes and the way they are collected, and we provide a conceptual framework from what can be concluded by evolutionary rates studies using each datatype.

Lack of comparability across existing methods makes definite conclusions more limited than what we wanted, but the biggest difference in our comparisons is always across datatypes.

We included discrete (phylogenetic characters) and continuous data (from 2D GMM) from the exact same species and, in most cases, from the exact same specimens. That was a lot of work…

We tried to assess whether rates of phenotypic evolution based on multivariate data (discrete and continuous), using popular methods, and which influence how we measure phenotypic change and innovation across lineages provide comparable results. The answer is a very big NO.

Evolutionary rate incongruences in squamates reveal contrasting patterns of evolutionary novelties and innovation Abstract. Understanding the rate of phenotypic evolution can reveal fundamental aspects of organismal evolutionary trajectories. Hence, several studies hav

Our latest paper, now how to conciliate apparently discrepant evolutionary rate patterns in squamates, but which may well apply to any study system with Stephanie Pierce and
@7brumas.bsky.social
#macroevolution

academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

‘Completely shattered.’ Changes to NSF’s graduate student fellowship spur outcry The announcement comes months later than usual, leaving many would-be applicants stranded

Today was a hard day for Ph.D. students who found out that they can no longer apply for NSF's prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program. "Devastating“ was how one student described it to me. #GradSchool #NSFGRFP

www.science.org/content/arti...

Assistant Professor, Tenure-Track, Department of Biology, University of San Francisco Job Title: Assistant Professor, Tenure-Track, Department of Biology, University of San Francisco Job Summary: The Department of Biology at the University of San Francisco invites applications for a fu...

Tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Bioinformatics in the Department of Biology at the University of San Francisco
usfca.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/USF_Fu...

Really nice paper! Taphonomic megabiases constrain phylogenetic information in the squamate fossil record
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Happy to share the advance version of our big AREES review on squamate origin and early evolution: From Fossils to Genomes with my two amazing colleagues, Frank Burbrink and @marcanthonytollis.bsky.social

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

EvoPhylo: An r package for pre‐ and postprocessing of morphological data from relaxed clock Bayesian phylogenetics Relaxed clock Bayesian evolutionary inference (BEI) enables the co-estimation of phylogenetic trees and evolutionary parameters associated with models of character and lineage evolution. Fast adva...

Don't forget to cite it if you use it!;)
Simões, T. R., Greifer, N., Barido-Sottani, J., & Pierce, S. E. (2023). EvoPhylo: an R package for pre- and postprocessing of morphological data from relaxed clock Bayesian phylogenetics. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. doi.org/10.1111/2041...

New stuff: combine_log now also combines posterior log files from BEAST2 and MCMCTREE; write_partitioned_alignments2 writes partitioned data as separate alignments for any data type; clade_membership designates clade membership for each tip for in the tree used by other functions

Post-processing Mr.Bayes and BEAST2 outputs: mode of selection upon morphological characters based on their rates of evolution + other stas and plots for phenotypic rates; Summary stats and plots for rates of diversification and fossilization from FBD analyses

EvoPhylo pre-processing: detects morphological clusters, and exporting datasets already formatted for partitioned phylo analyses.