As every year, we travelled to the Mediterranean region for fieldwork this spring. This year’s campaign had two main objectives: first, to collect animals from Sicily to establish breeding groups for a new project; and second, to sample three species of Podarcis that...

The Mediterranean region is home to 28 different species of wall lizards of the genus Podarcis, whose remarkable diversity has fascinated – and puzzled – naturalists for over a century. In some groups of organisms, such as birds, individuals can usually be assigned...

The bones of the vertebrate skull come from two developmental sources: the mesoderm and the neural crest. This dual origin allows to investigate how developmental properties influence evolutionary trends. In our paper published in Evolution Letters, we (Quentin,...

Disagreements are the bread and butter of science. What’s more, they tend to have positive consequences: scientific controversies usually motivate scientific rivals to gather new evidence, refine their theories, and reassess long-held assumptions. But while...

This year, two teams worked in parallel to pursue our studies on Podarcis diversification; Nathalie, Gwenaëlle and Tobias went to the western Mediterranean, while Guannan, Ivan and Quentin went to Brittany. The western Mediterranean team was complemented by Natalia...

As the EU-funded project IDEAL came to a close, Tobias and Bas Heijmans looked for a good scientific reason to stay in touch. Tobias’ plans to work on water fleas seemed like a promising way to collaborate. The only problem was that the project was not funded, but a...

Readers of this blog will be well aware of the conspicuous variation in dorsal color patterns of Anolis lizards – think of the spots of A. sabanus, or the bands of A. transversalis (both worthy a google search if you happen to be unfamiliar with them). Such patterns...

Natural historians have known for a long time that islands often harbour an extraordinary amount of biodiversity. One reason is that lineages that colonize islands can exploit open ecological niches and therefore diversify along new evolutionary trajectories. So did...

The rock-paper-scissors story of the side-blotched lizards was beautiful. Many lizards have similar colour polymorphism, and quite a few PhD projects and postdoc years have been spent testing the idea in other species. One of the most obvious candidates are wall...