Elmer Lab

We are back in the field and setting up a new experiment on reproductive mode evolution! Delays due to covid are behind us and I'm thrilled to be at CNRS Station for Theoretical and Experimental Ecology  and starting our collaboration with ecology legend Jean Clobert.  First lizard pots are ready and lizards are arriving this week! This is a  NERC funded project  with Maureen Bain and Jean Clobert, and the collaboration of Hans Recknagel and new postdoc Morgane Bonade, to dig deeper into the functional development of oviparity in ancestral and derived lineages. Through this experiment we will directly tackle the thorny issue of putative reversal to oviparity ... do lizards break Dollo's Law? Also perfect timing for some momentum, as our major paper on functional genomics of oviparity vs viviparity is in press. Free online at  https://rdcu.be/cy5S2 more new soon!

 Recently published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology -  Evolutionary origins of viviparity consistent with palaeoclimate and lineage diversification Hans Recknagel, Nicholas Kamenos, Kathryn Elmer freely available here a collaboration between evolutionary biology and Geography for reconstruction of palaeoclimate. It has long been argued that the origin of viviparity is related to cold climatic conditions. However this is challenging to disentangle correlation from causation, and response from cause. Also many studies have examined particular species groups but we have lacked the data so far to estimate a time tree in context of climate. Here led by Hans Recknagel in his interdisciplinary PhD studentship, we showed that stable and long-lasting cold climatic conditions are correlated with transitions to viviparity across squamates. Interestingly, this correlation of parity mode and palaeoclimate is mirrored by background diversification rate in squamat...