Last week saw a bizarre coincidental release of multiple publications in which I and many co-authors have put in lots of work during the past few months to the past few years.

The paper on the evolutionary history of the Galápagos Rail, mentioned in my previous post, was published and is available as Open Access at the journal website. Lead author for this super fun collaboration was Jaime Chaves.

I had the great privilege of formally describing a taxon new to science, a new subspecies of Red-capped Lark Calandrella cinerea rufipecta ssp. nov. that is restricted to the Jos Plateau in Nigeria. In the paper, we discuss taxonomy of the genus, and species delimitation across the whole lark family. The paper is available as Open Access at the journal website.

I have also been involved in the Bird10K project, which released its first publication of the second phase, in which the full genomes of representatives of almost all bird families have been sequenced. This work, which is a huge collaboration spearheaded by Shaohong Feng and Josefin Stiller, was published in Nature, where it is available as Open Access.

For full information about the papers, see my page on peer-reviewed research. Also, check in my book chapters section, as a long-awaited showpiece of a book came hot off the presses. It is the book The Largest Avian Radiation – The Evolution of Perching Birds, or the Order Passeriformes, edited by Jon Fjeldså, Per GP Ericson, and Les Christidis. Jon has also painted a huge number of beautiful illustrations, which on their own make this book a must on the coffee table. I have contributed a large-scale time-calibrated backbone phylogeny of all passerines. The book is for sale at Lynx Edicions.