News

It was a great honor to participate as a keynote speaker at the Meeting of the Spanish Society of Evolutionary Biology. I presented our latest work on the evolutionary consequences of enhanced cognition. It was wonderful to reconnect with old colleagues and discovering the outstanding research of the new generation of evolutionary biologists.

We recently visited the Natural History Museums of Pavia and Milan to collect samples from magpies from northern Italy. In addition, we were able to work with historical collections and even sampled a Chinese magpie specimen from 1846. Now comes the exciting part — seeing whether we can recover DNA.

Several years ago, Héctor Tejero-Cicuéndez and I met in Chicago (along with other great friends), and during a long walk we sketched out what became this study on how aridity shapes niche breadth and the phylogenetic structure of species living in arid environments. After a long way, today we’ve posted the preprint, and the manuscript is now under review at Nature Communications — fingers crossed!

You can find the preprint here:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.13.681566v1

Thanks to our collaboration with GREFA, Rubén has begun generating high-resolution 3D models of magpies from multiple populations across the Iberian Peninsula. This effort will soon provide a large-scale morphological dataset that we will use to investigate how morphology interacts with climate and urbanization in this widespread yet still surprisingly understudied species.

Between July 1 and July 15, 2025, we organized the first course on Evolution and Phylogenetics at the Universidad Nacional de Guinea Ecuatorial, supported by the European Union Erasmus++ program. The course brought together a highly motivated group of students who engaged deeply with both theoretical concepts and practical approaches in evolutionary biology. It was especially rewarding to learn about the diverse and innovative research projects they developed throughout the course, which led to stimulating discussions and new collaborative ideas. We also took the chance to do some fieldwork in this amazingly biodiverse country!

Honored to have been invited as a keynote speaker at the Spanish National Congress of Ornithology, where I presented our latest work on the evolution and diversification of crows. I was truly impressed by the outstanding quality of the contributions and discussions throughout the meeting. Spanish ornithology is flying high!