Nico Mongiardino Koch

Great ambient music, terrible phylogeny, highly uncertain ancestral state

I am looking for graduate students to join my lab in Fall 2027. If your interests lie within the realms of phylogenetics, macroevolution, and/or invertebrate biodiversity please reach out to me!!

The PROGressive PHYLOgenetics LAB is now officially open and I'm looking to hire at all levels!! If you are interested in phylogenetics and macroevolution, and enjoy any/all of the following: fossils, morphology, genomics, simulations, or method development, please reach out to me :)

🚨Cover reveal🚨: My first non-academic book: How to Find a Martian: A Fossil Hunter's Guide to the Red Planet. Published Spring 2027 by @oneworldbooks.bsky.social (UK/Ireland/Commonwealth, this cover) and @uchicagopress.bsky.social (North America, other cover). 100% human-authored!

My new book, Phylogenetic Biology, is now published. Available online for free at dunnlab.org/phylogenetic... . Physical copies can be purchased at shop.lightningsource.com/b/085?params... or your favorite bookstore.

Two weeks ago was my last first day of school! Very grateful to be here 😊

Is that Bayesian time of the year in #sistematicaunam @unam when we use the pain of non-convergence @nmkphylo.bsky.social experienced some years ago, that make for a great cautionary tale on parametric #phylogenetics

When I started my PhD ~10 years ago, only 2/5 echinoderm groups (the star-shaped sea stars and brittle stars) had genome-scale phylogenetic datasets. I am proud to say that the quest to complete the clade is now over doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

Becoming a part of the @systbiol.bsky.social community is one of my greatest scientific achievements. I am happy to celebrate this today with a journal cover and a nomination to the editorial team

Spring is here

Our latest paper, now how to conciliate apparently discrepant evolutionary rate patterns in squamates, but which may well apply to any study system with Stephanie Pierce and @7brumas.bsky.social #macroevolution academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

I am extremely happy to see that our review on fossil tip-dating is out in early view in Systematic Biology! A huge thanks to all the authors of this massive project (@heckeberg.bsky.social, @basantakhakurel.bsky.social, Gustavo Darlim, and @hoehna.bsky.social)! academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨 🗓️25th September 2025, 15:00 UTC🗓️ Join us next week to hear from @nmkphylo.bsky.social and @russellgarwood.co.uk, on “The Tree of Life and Death: What do Fossil Taxa Contribute to Morphological Phylogenetics?” 🌳🐣⚰️ Register here: bit.ly/palaeoverse-...

Today I learned the (very) hard way that R will tell you a file does not exist even when it totally does if the path to it exceeds 260 characters (in Windows) (and you can enable long paths, but it is not the default)

A Sunday reading Fabre’s “Souvenirs entomologiques” by the fireplace is a Sunday well spent

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series🚨 It’s time to announce our Summer 2025 talk schedule 👀 Looking forward to hearing from @spissatella.bsky.social, @sauropodlets.bsky.social, @nmkphylo.bsky.social and @russellgarwood.co.uk! Sign up here: bit.ly/palaeoverse-lecture-series-2025

📢 Tired of choosing between fossils to incorporate into your phylogenetic analysis? Us too. 💥 Check out our new preprint on incorporating stratigraphic ranges into the FBD model, implemented in BEAST2. We explore how using ranges affects the inference of dog 🐶 and penguin 🐧 trees 🌳

I'm recruiting a PhD student to join my lab at the University of New Orleans starting in Fall 2025. Research topics will focus on building and using phylogenies to study the diversification of birds, with an emphasis on Neotropical bird radiations. Contact me if interested.

I finally have something worth posting here! A new paper on wormsI never expected to see fossilised! Juracanthocephalus is the first body fossil of Acanthocephala and remarkably provides links with rotifers and other gnathiferans. Published in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Malvinas War erupted 43 years ago. Its memory remains to this day alive in every corner

Ahh the smell of fresh reviews in the morning

Check out my interview with @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social for some thoughts on phylogenies, uncertainty, and the complexities of life as a scientist

More good news!! Our (@russellgarwood.co.uk, @cambriannelids.bsky.social) 2023 article in Palaeontology is a #TopCitedArticle! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

One of the wood-associated seastars we described last year was chosen as one the top 10 new marine species of 2024! ⭐️

Like morphometrics, micro-CT scanning, and morphological evolution? Then please consider applying for our 18 month postdoc position at the university of Southampton! Details here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMF402/r...

New preprint out with @echinerd.bsky.social et al. on total-evidence dating showcasing: 1) Sea urchins (the best clade) 2) Lyrics by Peter Gabriel-era Genesis (the best prog band) 3) Extreme effect of the type of relaxed clock on phylogenetic and macroevolutionary inferences (a bit scary honestly)

To celebrate the 7th month of our exile in 🇦🇷 (or 29.17% of our sentence), it sure is good to share with everyone that I have become a remote member of @trsimoes.bsky.social lab at Princeton EEB

Altmetric has gone rogue with a rant about atonal music and metal. @russellgarwood.co.uk I bet you didn’t see that coming

Urban paleontology

New paper in Systematic Biology with cool dude @jgsaulsbury.bsky.social academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

Job Alert: Senior Research Associate in Phylogenomics @bristolpalaeo.bsky.social researching timing, sequence and phenotypic consequences of rediploidisation following whole genome duplication - comparative genomics, molecular clock and phenotypic disparity methods, with @jameswclark.bsky.social

If you like snowflakes, check our new preprint about axial patterning in brittle stars ⭐ We looked at the expression of anteroposterior patterning genes in Amphipholis squamata juveniles, and compared it with existing data from other classes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... @lowelab.bsky.social

I overheard a guy at the pharmacy saying happy valentine to a neighbor, to which she answered “don’t be stupid, that is yankee nonsense” Love is in the air here down south

New year, new order of magnitude 🎉