Find out about our latest news and events.

News

Monday, 19 Sep 2022

Spring isn't all it's quacked up to be. Pollen levels are high, magpies are terrorising cyclists and pedestrians alike, and protective duck parents are in attack mode.

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Saturday, 03 Sep 2022

Our new research unites genomic sequencing and museum collections to reconstruct the evolutionary tale of native rodents, including many extinct and elusive species – and they have a fascinating origin story.

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Thursday, 01 Sep 2022

If swooping season strikes fear into your heart, you're not alone. Fortunately, Dr Chaminda Ratnayake from the ANU Research School of Biology has the intel you need to navigate the great outdoors this spring.

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Magpie-lark pair duetting. Image: Pawel Rek
Thursday, 14 Jul 2022

A new study shows Australian magpie-larks may use a ventriloquial illusion to make their vocal duets more threatening.

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Friday, 27 May 2022

To measure the speed of adaptive evolution in the wild, we studied 19 populations of birds and mammals over several decades. We found they were evolving at twice to four times the speed suggested by earlier work.

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Friday, 27 May 2022

The raw material for evolution is much more abundant in wild animals than we previously believed, according to new research.

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Events

Pablo Recio Santiago
6 Jun 2025 | 3 - 4pm

Cognition plays a vital role in survival and reproduction, yet individuals often differ in their cognitive abilities. In my thesis, I investigated the combined influence of prenatal corticosterone (CORT) — the primary GC in reptiles — and incubation temperature on cognition in two species of skink.

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Celine Frere
29 May 2025 | 1 - 2pm

Hidden in plain sight and often going unnoticed, animals are undergoing changes in their behaviour, physiology, and morphology to survive an urban life. In this seminar, I will focus what my work on eastern water dragons has taught us about urban evolution.

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Image by Dustin Marshall
22 May 2025 | 1 - 2pm

Weird as it may seem, our understanding of why species are the size they are is very limited. We don't really know why organisms grow, why they stop growing when they do, or why size changes when conditions change.

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Field Image
1 May 2025 | 1 - 2pm

A fundamental goal of evolutionary biology is to understand the processes that contribute to patterns of genomic variation and how this relates to adaptive variation (phenotypes) and ultimately fitness.

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Charles Marshall
30 Apr 2025 | 1 - 2pm

While the path by which a scientific advance is made is not particularly relevant to science itself, the path is everything for practicing scientists.

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Pieter Arnold
20 Mar 2025 | 1 - 2pm

Australian native plants are remarkably tolerant to a wide range of environmental conditions in which they grow.

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