Mitochondria are the energy plant of our cells. Originally, they were bacteria, but then they were captured by the ancestors of eukaryotes (among others all animals, mushrooms and plants) and used to produce energy for the cell. This is also known as the endosymbiotic theory. An inheritance from […]

Yesterday, Jørgen Hansen Starholm defended his Master thesis “Solving phylogenetic relationships within the Rove beetle genus Aleochara (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae) by utilizing a novel approach based on High Throughput Sequencing” successfully. The purpose of the thesis was to infer a phylogeny of Aleochara based on more nuclear markers and […]

Last week, as part of a special issue of Zoologica Scripta, I started the year with my first paper – and my first solo effort! “The Wealth of Shared Resources: Improving molecular taxonomy using eDNA and public databases” is a rather portentous title for a pretty simple experiment. […]

Keeping up with the literature and scientific discussions with colleagues in order to develop new ideas and projects and to reflect on old ones are important parts in the academic daily routines. The FEZ group runs together with colleagues from the SERG and EPA research groups at the […]

This month’s ”Group of the month” is a bit of shameless self-promotion. I will present an animal group today, where we conduct quite a lot of research on. However, it is nonetheless really interesting and worth to learn more about it. The family Parergodrilidae belongs to the annelids […]

Today, I would like to present to the paper by Tianzhu Xiong and James Mallet about “On the impermanence of species: The collapse of genetic incompatibilities in hybridizing populations” in Evolution. The topic of the paper is not my area of research, which are deep level phylogeny, evolutionary […]

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 […]

Spiders, insects and even more so worms and wormlike invertebrates are often considered ugly and disgusting, at least unappealing, and sometimes even dangerous. Certainly, there is also beautiful invertebrates such as e.g., butterflies, beetles, dragonflies, or some sea slugs, but usually invertebrates appeal little to our understanding of […]

Summer is here, so it’s time for the Artsdatabanken project team to go back to the field. Or to the sea, in our case. After driving 500km from the east to the west coast, through beautiful mountains and majestic fjords, we arrived at Austevoll (Figure 1), an archipelago […]

Black coffee but also cookies, nuts, chocolate and fruits – certainly highly appreciated ingredients to support lively scientific discussions. This is also true for the recent SNAC discussions of scientific staff at the Natural History Museum Oslo (NHM). Lively discussions – isn’t that the normal default for scientists? […]