When floods are mentioned, what first comes to mind is a disastrous catastrophe wrecking houses, devastating crops and, occasionally, even costing human lives. Yet, what may be a bad news for an average human could be a strike of luck for a beetle collector. Imagine flood water covering […]

The answer to this question may lay in the paper I am presenting today and at some level genomes seem to be very stable. It was probably one of the most discussed papers at the museum this year. It was the topic of several journal clubs and shows […]

Although I am working almost exclusively with marine invertebrates, one of my favourite papers this year was about birds. Hughes et al. (2022) set a quite ambitious goal: to test whether the loss of species threatened with extinction could lead to morphological and phylogenetic homogenization across the entire […]

Although frequently neglected, animals and fungi share a close evolutionary relationship. Despite the huge differences in morphology, ecology, life history and behaviour they represent the two major lineages within Opisthokonta, a clade that was earlier referred to as the “Fungi/Metazoa group” in the Tree of Life. You may […]

By now it is already a good tradition for the FEZ group at the Natural History Museum Oslo to provide in December an advent calendar blog. In previous years, the focus was on our own research and scientific output. This year we thought to take a different approach. […]