The manuscript is currently under review. I would be happy to have feedback from the community on the preprint as well. 5/5 PS - I am moving away from this platform, and this may be my last post here. Find me in the blue butterfly space.

This paper is "disruptive" in a number of senses. It questions the validity of long/short-germ distinction, which has been at the center of segmentation research for years. It also forces a rethinking of the role of Hox genes in defining segment identities in arthropods. 4/5

I argue that tagmata are ancestrally defined by different segmentation modes. These differences can still be seen in some cases (hemimetabolous insects, arachnids) but are lost or obscured in most of the best-studied models, and have therefore been overlooked. 3/5

In this paper I tried to re-frame the question of arthropod tagmata from the point of view of early development, building heavily on work from my lab over the past decade or so, as well as a broad literature survey of classical developmental papers and relevant fossils. 2/5

New preprint just dropped. This is the first of my "sabbatical papers" - conceptual/synthetic papers trying to address broader questions of body-plan evolution. 1/5 ecoevorxiv.org/repository/vi…

I am also joining the mass migration to bluer skies. I will continue to lurk here, but mostly for local/current affairs. All of my science activity will move to the other place.

Not sure I see the point of your example. The distinction is one that is relevant for comparing animals that exist today. It’s an evolutionary explanation for the intuitive feeling of some animals being primitive.

Of course there is. I usually make the point that there is no such thing as a primitive organism but there are primitive (or ancestral) characters. Some organisms are more conservative in the sense that they maintain more primitive characters, but that doesn’t make them ancient.

The first two people to like this post are scientists working on so-called “ancient” animals. They know exactly what I’m talking about.

In all my various outreach activities I’ve found that one of the most difficult ideas to explain to the general public is the fact that there is no such thing as ancient species and modern species. Many professional biologists fall for that error.

Thanks Yehu.

New paper in @EvoDevo_BMC, led by @AMBLVit, on the early development of the German cockroach. Cool embryology and weird deviations from most of the well-studied insect models. Note teasers for an upcoming paper on the evolution of arthropod tagmosis. rdcu.be/dYeNI

Not to mention polyphyletic Arthropoda.

No other explanation for it.

I still have three weeks before the semester starts, and I hope to finish and submit a few papers and proposals by then. Then, it is back to routine, and counting the months until the next sabbatical. 10/10

I was free from teaching and admin, but I did not stop editorial and reviewing commitments. I felt that since I was writing papers, it was only fair that I should also review and handle papers. Some of these commitments took up much more of my time than I expected. 9/10