Palynology from A to Z: A as in Aponogeton

One thing, full-blood scientists usually forget, is to advertise their work. Usually because they lack the time. I have plenty and started a series of daily threads on Twitter advertising palynological research. But my reach there is miniscule and the half-life of tweets is extremely short. Hence, this post series.

Surviving parsimonists: just tree-naive or tree-blindfolded?

A generation ago, an epic battle took place, largely unnoticed outside mathematical and biological sciences: the Phylogenetic Wars. By the mid-1990s, the war was over and probabilistic methods for tree-inference replaced traditional parsimony. But there is a small, quite dusty realm that still pretends nothing happened: palaeontology. A long read about undervalued data and stubborn old white men.

Cladistics vs Phylogenetics: What's the difference?

While working for a 2-piece post on the Genealogical World of Networks (A bit of heresy: networks for matrices used in Cladistics studies), I stepped over a threat on ResearchGate, where someone asked this. I browsed through the answers, and felt obliged to answer as well.

Digging deeper: Population dynamics and individual-based fossil phylogenies

In one of my last posts, I argued for looking out for ancestor-descendant relationships when putting up an evolutionary hypothesis based on fossil data. In this post, I will explore a bit the background of individual-based phylogenies and why we should keep in mind population processes, when analysing such data sets.

The challenging and puzzling ordinary beech – a (hi)story

While working on another post, I noticed I could need an example for a pretty well-understood evolution of a plant genus through space and time. But to keep the other post a short-as-possible, the example merits its own. So here's the history of the beeches, which is a nice story to tell, also regarding how it developed scientifically.

Where have all the ancestors gone?

In contrast to neontologists, palaeontologists deal literally in the past. However, like their modern counterparts, most palaeontologists seem to have the opinion that although we all agree evolution is a fact, we will never have to deal with actual ancestors.

How did I do it – a short guide to a nice graph

At the end of the 20^th and into the new 21^st century, phylogenies have been largely reduced to stick graphs, often quite unappealing ones. In the papers I co-authored, I always tried to enhance the graphics, and I have not rarely been asked how I do it. So here's my protocol for a little basic tree-and-networks magic.

What I was not allowed to show #2: Networks explaining molecular evolution in wax plants

Thanks to the confidentiality of the review system, experimental research that goes beyond the standard applications may be lost to the Impermeable Fog. In this post, I'll will show several reconstructions I made for a paper of a colleague on Hoya (Asclepioideae), the wax plants.

What I was not allowed to show #1: A neighbour-net of seed plants

Even as a professional scientist, I always put a lot of effort in enhancing the graphics of our papers. In some cases, the mighty Wizards of the Forest of Review appreciated the effort, but most didn’t bother. In some cases, the circumstances forced me to dump some pretty nice graphs. In this series of posts, I’ll show what has been lost because of the Impermeable Fog, or because my co-authors were vary it might wake dogs and more evil things lurking in the Forest of Review.