Never thought I'd see this, especially not in Reading #aurora

Nice work Ellie Jarvis!

Excited to share that our group at the Milner Centre for Evolution University of Bath has published a new paper in Nature Communications! 📄 We led a collaboration with four other universities, exploring gene family size evolution 🧬 and its link to sexual size dimorphism 🦭. nature.com/articles/s4146…

What happened to flowering plants 66 Mya at the K-Pg mass extinction? If you want to hear about what phylogenies and fossils say, and the work Santiago Ramírez Barahona and I have done, I am doing a Royal Society Publishing seminar in a few weeks. Chaired by Prof Chris Venditti cassyni.com/events/EJXN1Vm…

Lots of cancer drugs are plant derived. But can ethnobotanical knowledge and phylogenies guide the discovery of future cancer drugs? Our study suggests potential, and we discuss areas for future research. Work with Julie Hawkins in Plants People Planet 🌱👥🌐 🌱 doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.1…

What drove the diversification of cacti? We built a phylogeny of >1k species and a dataset of 39 variables, and used ML to identify the most important forces. Abiotic forces and size are powerful, and aridity is weak. Complexity should not be ignored. 🏜️ nature.com/articles/s4146…

Congrats Dr Kain!

#Phylogeny and bioprospecting: The diversity of medicinal plants used in #cancer management Thompson & Hawkins Jamie Thompson #Ethnobotany #MedicinalPlants #TraditionalKnowledge. 📖nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pp…

New paper from Jamie Thompson & Priest Lab - University of Bath! Cacti are amongst the most diverse plants! This study sheds light on the mystery as to why are there so many different types. You can listen to senior author, Nick Priest, chat about the paper and its findings here: YouTube:

What’s the secret behind the stunning diversity of cacti?: Cacti's evolution isn't just about aridity. Soil texture, temperature swings, and seasonal changes are key. earth.com/news/whats-the… #EarthDotCom #EarthSnap #Earth

In this new work with Jamie Thompson, we reply to an open critique of our previous work on angiosperms' survival across the KPg, which we think is a flawed critique both philosophically and technically 1/2 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs…

Feel free to join this or watch it later. It should be fun, hopefully people will find it interesting! Not sure if my picture with the angry screaming kitten was the most professional choice for the Royal Society website though... Oops