I participated in the II Meeting of the Brazilian Society for Evolutionary Biology that took place 15-17 July 2026 at UFMG in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil (where I currently live). It was a great opportunity to integrate back into the Brazilian community, meet old friends and initiate new collaborations. The organization was impeccable, innovative […]
Category: biology
Posts about biology usually related to my research on the evolution of embryonic development in animals.
Later this year I’ll be joining the Comparative Embryology of Marine Invertebrates (CEMI) course as an instructor. It will be held from November 25th to December 8th, 2026, at CEBIMar–USP, São Sebastião, Brazil. CEBIMar is where I did my master’s thesis about the embryonic development of a sea biscuit and where the Oceano and Cifonauta […]
I went to the 10th Meeting of the European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology that took place in Glasgow, Scotland (9-12 June 2026). I’ve been to EED’s meetings since 2012, and this was the first after starting my position in Brazil. It was great to catch up with everyone again and meet several people that […]
I deposited the codebase that powers EvoDevo Papers on Zenodo. It is now citable: Vellutini, B. C. (2026). EvoDevo Papers: a literature bot for evolutionary developmental biology. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18238617
I’ve released a major update to EvoDevo Papers. The database now has all the papers posted since 2015 and a new search form for swiftly exploring the contents. Full archive In the previous update, I improved the website by creating separate pages for feeds, posts and individual papers to make the database contents accessible to […]
The winners of this year’s Nikon Small World in Motion are out, and my favorite is the 5th place entry, A newborn sea urchin walking along the seabed by Alvaro Migotto: It’s adorable to see these newly metamorphosed echinoderms and their long and chubby tube feet learning how to walk. This scene reminded me of […]
The other day I stumbled upon this passage in the Wikipedia page of Piseinotecus, a genus of beautiful nudibranch sea slugs: The name Piseinotecus comes from the Portuguese sentence “pisei no Teco” (I stepped onto Teco). Teco was the name of a dog of the zoologists Ernst Marcus and Eveline Du Bois-Reymond Marcus. While they […]
This is a wonderful project mashing images from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) with data from Wikidata and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). BHL Image Explorer: https://bhl-gallery.toolforge.org/ It enables us to explore the figure plates present in BHL’s catalog (also on Flickr and Wikimedia Commons), links with other databases, and keeps track of their […]
The peer-reviewed version of our cephalic furrow paper is out 🎉 It was published back-to-back with another cephalic furrow study: Research mutualism This was a wonderful collaborative effort to understand the developmental role and evolutionary origins of this prominent but overlooked tissue fold of fly embryos. We were two teams working on a similar question, […]
Amazing deep-sea biodiversity imagery from the expedition Underwater Oases of Mar Del Plata Canyon: Talud Continental IV. Organized by researchers of the CONICET and Schmidt Ocean Institute. The ROV is streaming live. Tip by Marina Cuenca.