Brain Evolution News

Out of Darkness, Blind Cavefish Illuminate Brain Evolution www.fau.edu/newsdesk/art...

Dog Brains Segment Speech Into Words With a Humanlike Consonant Bias bioengineer.org/dog-brains-s...

First complete songbird genome reveals hidden biology www.rockefeller.edu/news/40239-f...

The Evolution of the Human Brain Set It Up for Failure www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...

Humans and songbirds organize the same sounds differently www.uva.nl/shared-conte...

Chimp and gorilla brains resist weight loss with age — unlike human brains www.nature.com/articles/d41...

3D genome 'entanglement' may explain how cephalopods evolved complex brains phys.org/news/2026-10...

Scientists Finally Figured Out Why 90% of Humans Are Right-Handed www.vice.com/en/article/s...

Study Supports and Expands the Primate Brain Lag Hypothesis neurosciencenews.com/brain-lag-ev...

Fossil study finds vision—not the 'thinking' frontal lobe—drove varied brain development in primates phys.org/news/2026-08...

Brain organoids uncover how primates develop different brain shapes phys.org/news/2026-09...

Its basal part is derived from the evolutionarily expanding early RL, like the other CN. The higher-order part is uniquely derived from the late RL and doesn’t recruit inhibitory IO-projection neurons, forming an entirely different cerebellar circuit.

In the 1-to-2-to-3 nucleus evolution scheme, we often think of the medial nucleus as the oldest, most basal nucleus, but it also performs higher-order functions in mammals. Here, we resolve this by finding that the medial nucleus has a dual developmental and likely evolutionary origin!

Nucleus-invariant inhibitory neurons integrate into these territories by P4.

The cerebellar nuclei expanded from 1 to 2 to 3 nuclei across vertebrates. We find that it is the early RL that changes to produce these new nuclei. Making a new nucleus is a two-step process: Make a new progenitor, then sort its offspring into spatially separate regions.

In mice, excitatory CN neurons establish all adult nuclear territories by E15.5.

So, what distinguishes one reptilian pallium from another may be the lineage-specific modulation of a conserved transcriptional program. Building a neocortex may therefore have had more to do with re-using an ancient blueprint.

Jiménez S., Moreno-Cerdá A., Moreno-Bravo J.-A., Moreno N. y García-Moreno F. (2026). Divergent structural trajectories for pallial regionalization within reptiles reveal conserved evolutionary blueprints. Cerebral Cortex 36(9): bhag131 🫶🏻 👉🏽 t.co/RtU0ninn3H

Result 5. In both species, we found apical and basal progenitors, but no detectable Eomes+ intermediate progenitors 🕵🏼‍♀️ , the cell type associated with cortical expansion in mammals 🐁🧠.

Result 4. Beneath all this divergence, the medial and lateral cortices retain the same organization. The most parsimonious interpretation is therefore that these regions were already present in the last common ancestor of amniotes.

Result 3. Geckos 🦎 have a spherical nucleus 🌀 that turtles simply do not possess. It may correspond to the pallial amygdala described in chelonians: the same ancestral territory, but organized differently.

Result 1. The dorsal cortex is not uniform. Satb1 and Satb2 subdivide it into two distinct regions in both species, consistent with what has been described in other sauropsids…🐊

For the first time in these species, we used in situ Hybridization Chain Reaction (HCR) (@molecularinstruments) to map gene expression 🧬, together with 3D light-sheet microscopy 😯

Why reptiles? Not because they are “primitive”, they have been evolving for exactly as long as we have. But they never developed a six-layered cortex. So, the features they still share with us are more likely to have been inherited than independently reinvented.

The pallium is the region of the forebrain that ultimately gave rise to our neocortex. All amniotes have one: mammals 🐁, birds 🐥, and reptiles 🦎. But how it is subdivided, and which cell types build it, is still a matter of debate.

FANTASTIC WORK led from beginning to end by social-netowrkless Dr. Sara Jiménez! And with our lovely collaborators in Madrid and Alicante: Ana Moreno-Cerdá, Juan Antonio Moreno-Bravo and Nerea Moreno. 🫶🏻 👉🏽 academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

The cerebral cortex that is reading this sentence (yours, to be explicit) did not come out of nowhere. It has evolved over hundreds of millions of years... To study this evolutionary process, we decided to focus on non-avian reptiles for our new paper in Cerebral Cortex 🐢🦎🧠 🧵

New preprint! TLDR: We mapped the genetic architecture of neonatal vocalization in deer mice, and found candidate genes expressed in the cerebellum that could be contributing to the evolution of temporal structure in infant cries #Bioacoustics #neuroskyence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Amazing work led by @nickjourjine.bsky.social showing how the species-specific temporal structure of neonatal vocalizations in deer mice can be traced back to cerebellar anatomy & maybe even to a genomic locus containing plausible gene candidates [e.g ASTN2, well studied by @mbhatten.bsky.social ]🧪

NEW PREPRINT! An evo-devo look at how new cerebellar nuclei are made. Spoiler: it’s all driven by region-specific excitatory progenitors in the early rhombic lip; inhibitory neurons fill in later. If you care about brain evolution or cerebellar development, check it out: tinyurl.com/CNdevelopment

Special thanks to @ellylewerissa.bsky.social for leading this effort and to @naelnadifkasri-lab.bsky.social for supporting this more ambitious attempt. It’s been great to discuss this material with them on many occasions

Our preprint on the impact of CHD2 dosage on human brain maturation & evolution received very thoughtful comments from readers (🙏). This motivated us to do a couple more experiments that bolster our original claims. The substantially revised version is now on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social 🧪

I am excited to announce that I will start the Brain Origins Lab at the Crick in March 2027! Using acoels as a model system, the lab will study how animal brains evolve, and how innovations in brain organisation enable new computational abilities and the evolution of complex behaviour.

A look at the scientists studying brains and behavior in species found almost nowhere else. Check out our collection of articles on current neuroethology research in Latin America. By Natalia Mesa www.thetransmitter.org/neuroetholog...

European Network for Brain Evolution Research sites.google.com/site/eurobra...

Scaled up to size, a raccoon brain would contain roughly the same number of neurons as a human brain. fortune.com/2026/01/16/a...

Hot of the press! 🧠🦴 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Digital atlas of cortical sulcal imprints on #Pan endocasts now out in open access in the @journalofanatomy.bsky.social!" @palevoprim.bsky.social, @cam-archaeology.bsky.social, @cnrsecologie.bsky.social, @fondationfyssen.bsky.social

🧠 This week #CoEvol team member @edwindejager.bsky.social is presenting his work on hominin brain evolution at the Evolution of Brain Connectomics Workshop in Lyon! @palevoprim.bsky.social @cnrsecologie.bsky.social @fondationfyssen.bsky.social

‘This is dangerous’: slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Inside the Not-So-Dumb Head of the Dodo Bird nautil.us/inside-the-n...

Fun bird news: Scans of the internal contours of dodos's skulls hint at the sensory abilities of these famous extinct birds. (Via Nautilus.) nautil.us/inside-the-n...

Great interview on CBC with @evolsara.bsky.social on Dodo brains today #yql #Canada 🦤 🧠 🧪 @weisbeckerbblab.bsky.social @aub-birdy.bsky.social www.cbc.ca/player/play/...

Primates with longer thumbs tend to have bigger brains, research finds | Evolution | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

the other looking atastrocyte-derived signals (lab of @aleksandrapekowska.bsky.social) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We examined how mammal ancestor brain size changed through the end-Permian extinction and found it barely changed! Brain evolution may have been put on hold for millions of years until ecosystems recovered. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Unlocking the early evolution of brain and feeding strategies in Anseriformes: the case of Conflicto antarcticus royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

Unlocking the early evolution of brain and feeding strategies in Anseriformes: the case of Conflicto antarcticus: doi.org/10.1098/rsos... #RSOS #palaeontology #evolution

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... This looks really cool!

What next? More data are needed. Higher-resolution measures of calories & complexity: temperature, latitude, oxygen, predators, prey, competition and measures of brains beyond size. Data here: https://cephdata.com 12/