Trinity College Dublin, Ecology and Evolution
A warm welcome back to all our readers! The new year is now well and truly upon us and we hope you’ve all had a safe and energised return to work. This blog is written by Fionn Ó Marcaigh, summarising his new paper. Congratulations Fionn and we hope our readers enjoy learning about your research …
What is the first image that comes to mind when you think of evolution? Possibly a line of cartoon primates marching, slouching monkeys at one end and naked men with spears at the other. Or a branching tree diagram where each twig represents an organism, maybe with a tentative “I think” scribbled above it. Alternatively, …
PhD student Fionn Ó Marcaigh on his research investigating sexual dimorphism in the Sulawesi Babbler
Studying diversification in the Todiramphus kingfishers of Sulawesi often brought to mind the adage, ‘what is rare is beautiful’. Though I certainly also learned that rare beauties can be incredibly frustrating! While I could be guaranteed to catch my other main study taxa, Zosterops white-eyes, by the dozen in the right habitat, Collared Kingfishers (Todiramphus …
Continue reading “Kingfisher Evolution in the Wallacea Region”
A recent study led by Laura Russo (Trinity College Dublin) and published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, explores coevolutionary patterns in diffuse networks and how these patterns may influence the evolution of individual species. Read more in the blog post snippet below, or see the full blog post on the Methods.blog:
First in a series of posts on life after an undergraduate degree, Alison Boyce gives an account of the life of a scientific technician. Science, engineering, and computing departments in universities employ technicians. Anyone working or studying in these areas will have dealt with a technician at some point but most will be unaware of …
Continue reading “The Evolution and Laboratory of the Technician.”
Last December I was asked to participate in the TEDxUCD 2015 event. The event included 9 national and international speakers with a wide range of ideas worth spreading. Despite being asked to participate only two days prior to the event luckily I could draw on the wide research area encompassed in my new Post Doc …
Continue reading “Listening to Evolutionary Oddities @TEDxUCD”
I sometime come across papers that I missed during their publication time and that shed a new light on my current research (or strengthen the already present light). Today it was Cartmill’s 2012 Evolutionary Anthropology – not open access, apologies… Cartmill raises an interesting question from an evolutionary point of view: “How long ago did …
I’ve been touring international natural history museums as part of my PhD research. The “behind the scenes” aspect of each museum is fairly unchanging; row upon row of cabinets with some very unusual objects lurking within – the taxidermic tastes of some people just leave you wondering… Aside from the obvious dissimilarities in size, the …
A paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (including Trevor Hodkinson, Botany, School of Natural Sciences, TCD; Trinity Centre for Biodiversity Research) highlights the role of leaf anatomical change in the evolution of a type of photosynthesis (classified as C4) that has allowed a large group of grass species …
Continue reading “Anatomical enablers in the evolution of grasses”