Elmer Lab

Congratulations to Hans Recknagel for his talk in the Hamilton symposium at ESEB/Evolution in Montpellier, Aug 2018. Hans gave a fantastic talk in a really competitive line up of outstanding PhD projects from around the world. It was a great honour to be shortlisted. ps - there was more than one other person in the audience of that HUGE theatre, just that I was up near the front.

Well done to Team Lizard 2017, who have had their paper on a rare but pervasive colour polymorphism in common lizards published! The summer field team of University of Glasgow Zoology undergrads, a masters and a PhD student analysed and drafted this paper from the field site, documenting melanic common lizards in the Alps. There is also the possibility melanism is sex biased, as only females were found, but given how rare these specimens are it is difficult to draw conclusions on that and more sampling will be needed. Paper is out in Herpetology Notes  2018 Melanism in common lizards (Squamata: Lacertidae: Zootoca vivipara): new evidence for a rare but widespread ancestral polymorphism by Hans Recknagel, Megan Layton, Ruth Carey, Henrique Leitão, Mark Sutherland, Kathryn R Elmer https://www.biotaxa.org/hn/article/view/33903 Abstract. The presence of a dark-coloured body colouration polymorphism (melanism) is a pervasive phenomenon in the animal kingdom, particularly in rep

Our paper on the evolution of oviparity and viviparity, as inferred from phylogenomics, is now fully available in the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution at   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2018.05.029 Common lizards break Dollo’s law of irreversibility: genome-wide phylogenomics support a single origin of viviparity and re-evolution of oviparity Well done to Hans, who led this work as part of his PhD 'Trees through time', a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Interdisciplinary grant from the University of Glasgow and into the NERC grant. This research was earlier covered by New Scientist  here  when the ms was a preprint.