Written by Line Willersrud and Rita M. Austin The phylum Chordata contains the three subphylums, Tunicata, Cephalochordata and Vertebrata. Vertebrata, which includes humans and all other mammals, birds, fishes, amphibians and reptiles, are differentiated from other chordates by having an enclosed vertebral column, the backbone. But inclusion in […]

We were fortunate to obtain finding from ArtsDatabanken for new project. Yesterday the contracts were signed and hence our project can start soon. We are an international team of researchers: Torsten Struck and Rita Austin from Norway, Arne Nygren from Sweden, and Maria Capa from Spain. Maybe not […]

Usually I work with marine invertebrates from a group called Lophotrochozoa, which comprises among others mollusks, segmented worms and flatworms. However, the paper featured in this blog is the first of several papers to come on insects. While the others will come from Marianne’s PhD project on Aegialites […]

In October 2018, Vasily Radashevsky from the Russian Academy of Sciences briefly visited our collection to go through the material of Spionidae, marine worms of the phyla Annelida, the segmented worms. Vasily is very enthusiastic about spionids in all there facets and he is one of the world’s […]

Species of the genus Stygocapitella belong to the ringed worms, also known as Annelida. Annelids are worms like earthworms, lugworm or christmas tree worms, but also leeches or very tiny worms living in the spaces between the sand grains, called the interstitium. Such an interstitial group of worms […]

In pre-Covid times, Samaneh Pazoki has visited our lab for 6 months from Iran as part of her PhD. In the meantime, she has successfully defended her PhD and we could already publish a second paper as part of her stay her. She is interested in Serpulidae from […]

Last week marked the release of a new paper by one member of the Invertomics group, James Fleming, in a field that seems quite far apart from the mission of the lab! "Eye-transcriptome and genome-wide sequencing for Scolecophidia: implications for inferring the visual system of the ancestral snake" was part of a long term collaboration...

Until relatively recently, museum collections have been amassed and utilized to investigate the morphological variation seen within and across species to understand evolutionary change. With the advent of next generation sequencing (NGS) and improved molecular methodologies, natural history collections have become ideal sources of curated (documented) materials to […]

            Systematics can be a tricky business, and the tardigrades are no stranger to this! The study of the diversification of life often requires sorting organisms into groups of more or less closely related ones. These groups are called species, genera, families, orders, classes, phylums and kingdoms. Whilst a […]

Natural history collections contain a plethora of objects, organisms, and information, representing real-world diversity, variation, and relationships. Collections allow scientists to understand and classify the natural world. Within biology, scientists classify and categorize animal species using taxonomy, a classification system based on the identification, description, and naming of […]