Group of the Month: Syllidae (Annelida)

On the blog this month, it’s time to for me to present another family of polychaetes. I will take a few steps away from my usual tentacles adorned critters to write about a peculiar group of worms, the family Syllidae. Syllids are a diverse family, with about 1100 […]

Beetle hunt in Japan – spring 2023

One of the best things with being a PhD-student at the Natural History Museum is the chance to do fieldwork. Most of our group members are doing fieldwork regularly to collect new material and to expand our collections. Unfortunately, the pandemic put a hold on many such plans, […]

On Pre-Prints, Publishing and Peer Review

Hallo readers, it’s James here again to announce the release of another new manuscript written by the FEZ group! This one is something we’ve been working on for quite some time, and it’s also the result of a really exciting collaboration with Pia Merete Eriksen, a guest researcher […]

The story about the Norwegian banker and the Hawaiian spiders ends – it was a great collaboration

Last week a long journey finally came to a result. If you remember, we were lucky to secure a Peder Sather grant to secure a collaboration between Rosemarie Gillespie’s lab and ours. Just a reminder from the last blog; Peder Sather was a banker and founder of the […]

Group of the month: Ostracoda

Sometimes, work and home come together in ways you don’t expect. I decided to get into aquascaping this summer, growing underwater plants and keeping nutrient cycles alive and self-sustaining between the soil, the plants, and small invertebrates. In my research, I was surprised to come across a little […]

ERGA pilot project – the selected species

As a proof of principle the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) consortium initiated at the beginning a pilot study. Several sequences centers and different research projects contributed to this pilot study allowing the first sequencing of reference genomes across Europe and setting the stage for application of the […]

Group of the Month: Placozoa

They may look a bit like bacteria, but Placozoans are actually animals! These microscopic blobs might, in fact, be key to understanding our own deep evolutionary history, and how the diversity of other animals came to be. Although they were discovered way back in 1883, there are only […]

Writing a Review: Introducing Your Field

            A few weeks ago, the FEZ group produced another new paper, this time in Evolutionary Applications, titled “Identifying and addressing methodology incongruence in phylogenetics: a review”. It’s actually the first review I’ve ever been involved in writing and was a big change from my usual research work. […]

Internships – an exciting opportunity for a hands-on way into science

The curriculum of academic studies is usually brimming with lectures, seminars and courses that aim at an efficient transfer of detailed knowledge. This is particularly true at the Bachelor level in Biology, that aims to provide a broad overview of many different disciplines in the field as the […]

Group of the month: Hydrozoa

This month at the blog, we wish to present Hydroza, which is a class found within phylum Cnidaria. This lesser-known taxa is perhaps more known than thought, as well-known species like Portuguese man-o-wars (Physalia physalis), the freshwater genus Hydra, fire coral (Milleporidae), and by-the-wind sailors (Velella velella). Also, […]