One of the coolest ways to use ancient DNA to explore the past is to try to reconstruct the relationship between individuals and populations in the past. Relatedness methods are quite common in human studies, where a lot of times you know from the start that several samples come from the same period and region, so we can explore if they were buried together because they were related “by blood” or if something else happened. In animals, however, this approach is less common. Shorter generation times, less careful burials and for most species a low density of samples make direct relatedness dificult to test. That, however, doesn’t mean we can’t use some of these methods to study how our populations are related to one another. With that in mind, come and join us and Jolijn Erven (University College Dublin) on April 16th, 14:00 CET to learn more about all the ways we can explore palaeogenomic data to describe the relatedness between our samples.

To register, follow the QR code or click here

For March the AaRCTikTalks go to the Land Down Under! We’ll have a matinée (in CET time) so we can host two amazing talks focused on Australia:

• Loukas Koungoulos: Origins and History of Australia’s Native Wild Dog
• Siobhan Evans: Tracing the Fate of Ancient DNA in Australian Cave Sediments

As with previous AaRCTikTalks, you can register to the seminar mailing list here or join us on Element, where a link will be shared minutes before it starts.

New year, new AaRC TikTalks! And we start strong with 2 amazing presenters:

• Tatiana Feuerborn: Tracind the Legacy of Greenland Sled Dogs throught time.
• Anianna Wingarten: Mitogenomes of Middle Pleistocene horses from Schöningen.

As with previous AaRCTikTalks, you can register to the seminar mailing list here or join us on Element, where a link will be shared minutes before it starts.

Ancient DNA from open-air sites reveals new insights about horse evolution

“Do you give the horse his strength? Do you clothe his neck with a mane? Do you make him leap like the locust? His majestic snorting is terrifying. He paws in the valley and exults in his strength; he goes out to meet the weapons. He laughs at fear and is not dismayed; he does not turn back from the sword.” (From the Book of Job 39:19-25).  

The horse legacy

For millennia, humans have celebrated the horse’s power, grace, and fearlessness. The text above captures something profound about these magnificent animals, their strength, their courage, their deep connection to human history. While the book of Job marvels at the power of the horse, long before horses carried riders or pulled chariots, their ancestors were already roaming prehistoric landscapes. The horse family (Equidae) has a fossil history stretching back about 55 million years, making it a key example for studying long-term evolution. Today, only one genus survives, Equus, which includes zebras, donkeys, and horses. However, fossils show that the family was once far more diverse, with more than 35 genera and many species [1]. Although some earlier lineages survived for a long time, most disappeared. As a result, all modern living horses descend from a single Eurasian lineage that originated from this later migration [2]. Our AaRC speaker Arianna Weingarten described how an early visit to a remarkable archeological site shaped her interest for paleogenomics research. Located between the cities of Hannover and Berlin, the place was the Middle Pleistocene open-air site complex of Schöningen in Lower Saxony, Germany, dated to about 320–300 thousand years ago. The site itself tells an extraordinary story: Schöningen is where archaeologists discovered the world’s oldest complete wooden spears, found alongside the butchered remains of 20-25 horses [3,4]. These artifacts provide direct evidence that our ancient hominin ancestors were already sophisticated hunters with complex tools, and horses were central to their survival.

Left: Dr. Hartmut Thieme uncovering an elephant tusk during a rescue excavation (Photo: Peter Pfarr). Middle: A horse skull discovered next to a wooden spear (Photo: Nicholas J. Conard). Right: Arianna during her first excavation at Schöningen with the excavation team and researchers Ivo Verheijen and Gabriele Russo (Photo: Jordi Serangeli).

Pushing the limits of ancient DNA

In their study, Arianna and her collaborators focused on two horse specimens recovered from the site and identified morphologically as Equus mosbachensis [5]. Using petrous bones, which often preserve DNA better than other tissues and bone types, they sequenced their mitochondrial genomes and determined that one individual was male and the other female. Extracting DNA from these Middle Pleistocene remains was particularly challenging. As Arianna described, the genetic material was highly fragmented and chemically damaged. To address this, the authors developed a specific computational method called DORIAN to help detect and down-weight damaged DNA bases [5], thus improving the accuracy of genome reconstruction. The recovery of such ancient mitochondrial genomes extended the known limit of DNA preservation in open-air sites to roughly 300,000 years, demonstrating that favorable environmental conditions can sometimes preserve genetic material almost as well as caves.  

Reconstructing the unbroken horse lineage

After such a success, Arianna compared them with more than a hundred ancient and modern horse mitochondrial sequences to assess their evolutionary relationship among past horse lineages. Previous research had established an ancestral clade (B) evolved in North America, which eventually migrated to Eurasia giving rise to two clades (A and C), one of which remigrated to North America during the Late Pleistocene and diversified into two additional clades (A1 and A2) [6]. The large megafaunal extinction of the Early Holocene, however, eventually resulted in the extinction of all these except for clade A, which gave rise to all modern horses [6]. Phylogenetic analyses carried out in this study showed that the two Schöningen horses occupy a basal position relative to the diversification of modern horses within clade A [5]. In simple terms, their maternal lineages split off very early from the clade that eventually led to living horses. Arianna and her collaborators also used molecular dating of the mitochondrial genomes, and determined the age of one of them to be around 360,000-years-old [5]. Moreover, they even estimated that the ancestral mitochondrial clade B diverged around 800,000 years ago from A and C clades, and that the A clade diverged from their ancient Schöningen horses around 570,000 years ago. The authors further report that a major diversification within extant clade A likely began after roughly 230,000 years ago, a period overlapping with an interglacial phase that may have influenced equine evolution through environmental change [5].  

New tools for new challenges

As Arianna finally highlights, their study shows how technological advances tailored for deep time remains are transforming the palaeogenetics field. Their innovative methods helped reducing bias and recovering more usable data from highly degraded samples. This study not only extends the timeline of what is possible in DNA recovery from open-air sites but also provides crucial data points for reconstructing horse evolution during a period that left few genetic traces.

References

1. MacFadden, B.J. & Hulbert, R.C. Explosive speciation at the base of the adaptive radiation of Miocene grazing horses. Nature 336: 466–468 (1988).
2. Rook, L. et al. Mammal biochronology (Land Mammal Ages) Around the world from Late Miocene to Middle Pleistocene and major events in horse evolutionary history. Front Ecol Evol 7: 278 (2019).
3. Hutson, J.M. et al. Persistent predators: Zooarchaeological evidence for specialized horse hunting at Schöningen 13II-4. J Hum Evol 196: 103590 (2024).
4. Hutson, J.M. et al. Revised age for Schöningen hunting spears indicates intensification of Neanderthal cooperative behavior around 200,000 years ago. Sci Adv 11: eadv0752 (2025).
5. Weingarten, A. et al. Mitochondrial genomes of Middle Pleistocene horses from the open-air site complex of Schöningen. Nat Ecol Evol 9: 2248 (2025).
6. Vershinina, A.O. et al. Ancient horse genomes reveal the timing and extent of dispersals across the Bering Land Bridge. Mol Ecol 30: 6144–6161 (2021).

Below, Arianna shared with us further details about her profile, career, prospects and future projects:  

1. Briefly introduce yourself. What is your origin story for how you got into science?
I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz without arriving with a plan to become a scientist. Instead of following a lifelong passion or being pushed to choose a subject early on, I was fortunate to have the freedom to explore different disciplines and gradually discover what I was interested in. I kept taking biology classes because it seemed like important knowledge for navigating the world, while geology classes drew me in with their field trips around California. This mix of practicality and curiosity eventually led me to a double major in biology and a combined anthropology/earth science degree. Somewhere along the way, I was introduced to ancient DNA and was immediately fascinated because it combined my interests of deep-time, geology, archaeology, and biology. This led me to my current position as a PhD student in the Archaeo-and Palaeogenetics group at the University of Tübingen.  

2. How and/or why did you start working on this project?
I actually started this project during my master’s degree, after I went on excavation at Schöningen. At the time there had been a few unpublished attempts at retrieving ancient DNA from the site. The project originated as my master’s thesis, in which we applied the most up-to-date sampling and laboratory protocols, and surprisingly, got some promising results! Building off this initial shotgun screening, my PhD research expanded the work by producing mitochondrial baits in-house and performing mitochondrial capture experiments to investigate a few species from the site. Though only the horse story is out at the moment!  

3. Were there any major challenges in this project? How did you overcome them?
Definitely. One of the major challenges was deciding how to best move forward with the data we generated. The extremely high damage in the samples, paired with the very short fragment lengths, meant that decisions about cut-off thresholds and how to handle damage had a large impact on the reconstruction of the mitogenomes. To deal with this we carried out extensive testing using different software tools and custom scripts. Ultimately, we established a collaboration with bioinformaticians at the University of Tübingen to develop a tool for our data (and similar data types!), which allowed us to keep the maximum amount of reliable information in our downstream analysis for molecular dating and phylogenetic work.  

4. What do you think are the main take-home messages of this project?
The main take-home message of the project is the opportunity for discovery that comes from pushing the boundaries of how far back in time, and across which environmental contexts, genetic data can be retrieved from the fossil record. However, this effort definitely requires keeping in mind a number of caveats, including rigorous data screening to ensure that the reconstructed genomes reflect true biological variation. Overall, it’s a little bit high risk, high reward but that’s also what’s exciting.  

5. What do you think is missing in the field that you would like to work on?
I’m really interested in the exploratory side of the field, so working with previously unknown genomes and stitching together paleontological, archeological, and genetic information. There are still so many extinct species that remain genetically unexplored. Expanding ancient genomic data, especially on the whole-genome-level, can provide a view into past adaptations and population dynamics and I would like to contribute to developing and applying these approaches.  

6. Where do you see yourself in the near future?
Since I’m at the end of my PhD, the near future looks like an intense final period, a hopefully not too horrible ending, followed by a dreamy vacation, and then on to the next adventure!  

7. Free space to tell something you would like to remark.
Thanks again for the invite :)

A genetic journey through the ancient lineage of Greenland’s Qimmit

“The dogs astutely sense that work is at hand. They shake off the new fallen snow, jumping up and down in their eagerness to get going. With assuredness, the musher selects his team of dogs, saving the lead dog, which today happens to be a bitch in golden colors, until the very last minute… Off we go. With a start, you are yanked back on the sled, and some time passes before you can gain your equilibrium. The silence, the enormous expanses of land, the bond between the musher and his dogs and the cold will quickly transport you to another world…” (Anonymous, from https://visitgreenland.com/)

Greenland Sled Dogs (Qimmit) being driven by students at the Qasigiannguit (Greenland) high school in a fan-hitch formation (Photo by Tatiana Feuerborn).

For over 800 years, Greenland’s iconic sled dogs, also known as Qimmit, have been an inseparable companion to the Inuit people, pulling sleds across frozen landscapes and enabling survival in one of Earth’s harshest environments. But today, these remarkable dogs face an uncertain future. Climate change is melting the sea ice they depend on, snowmobiles are replacing dog teams, and their numbers have plummeted from 25,000 in 2002 to just around 13,000 in 2020 [1].  

What makes the Qimmit unique among Arctic dog breeds? For nearly a millennium, they have served as sled dogs in the same region, partnering with the same communities. In contrast, other indigenous breeds, such as Siberian Huskies and Alaskan Malamutes, have been extensively crossbred with European dogs or adapted primarily as companions. The Qimmit, however, have remained closely tied to their original working role across Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Our AaRC speaker Dr. Tatiana Feuerborn described how she joined forces with other peers to analyze Qimmit genomic data spanning from 800 years before present to present days [2]. Their findings reveal a population shaped by centuries of isolation, regional differentiation, and remarkable resilience.  

A tale of two arrivals

They started by analyzing data from four different regions in Greenland: North (Avanersuaq), Northeast, East (Tunu), and West (Kitaa). Using demographic modeling, they determined that Qimmit probably arrived in Greenland in two distinct waves with the Inuit from Canada. The first wave, arriving around 1,164 years ago, gave rise to the Avanersuaq population, and the now-extinct Northeast population. A second wave, approximately 930 years ago, established the ancestral population that would split into the Kitaa and Tunu populations around 792 years ago. These findings align with archaeological evidence of a three-phase settlement of Greenland by the Inuit [3], and put Qimmit dogs as the oldest known dog breeds [4]. However, they also suggest something intriguing: either the dogs diverged before the settlement, or the Inuit arrival to Greenland occurred more than a century earlier than previously thought.  

The lost population

Nevertheless, the most poignant discovery concerns the extinct Qimmit population of Northeast Greenland. The Inuit of this region disappeared following their only recorded contact with Europeans in 1823, leaving no oral histories or human genetic legacy. The dog genomes, however, preserve their story. Dr. Feuerborn and collaborators revealed that the Northeast Qimmit were genetically highly homogeneous, evidencing a small, isolated population. When the region was resettled in 1925 by Inuit from the East, the genetic discontinuity was complete. Today’s Northeast dogs descend from these later arrivals related to the Tunu population, and not the original lineage.  

Surviving on the edge

After centuries of isolation, the Qimmit show concerning genetic trends in some regions. As Dr. Feuerborn described, the genetic diversity in Avanersuaq (North region) decreased between 1977 and the present, likely reflecting disease outbreaks including a devastating distemper epidemic that killed ~80% of dogs [2]. In Tunu (East), a similar effect was found through the 19th century, mirroring human population crashes from famine. Fortunately, 20th-century urbanization reversed this, as dogs from small isolated groups migrated to larger settlements, increasing the chances of unrelated mating. Overall, Qimmit’s genetic diversity was comparable to other wild isolated populations like dingoes, but they showed shorter homozygosity segments, indicative of a sustained small population over many generations.

A relatively unaltered lineage

A surprising finding challenged assumptions about colonial influence. Despite over 300 years of Danish-Norwegian presence in Greenland, Dr. Feuerborn highlighted the minimal European dog ancestry present in modern Qimmit. This contrasts sharply with other Arctic breeds. They identified a few heavily admixed individuals, evidencing a distinct dark-furred lineage mostly used for coat fur. But these remained exceptions. The low European dog influence reflects successful early conservation policies that created a protected “sledding district” where only Qimmit dogs were allowed.

More intriguingly, Inuit oral traditions speak of deliberately breeding female dogs with wolves to strengthen their teams. The genetics, however, tell a more complex story. While Arctic dogs do show greater allele sharing with wolves compared to European or African breeds [5], this reflects ancient introgression that occurred before the lineage spread into North America. Additionally, wolves in Greenland are now restricted to northern regions, limiting contact with most Qimmit populations.

A complex crossroads ahead

The Qimmit now stand at a critical juncture. Effective population size estimates show accelerated decline over the past 150 years, and climate change threatens the very foundation of their existence, the sea ice. Shaped by intense natural and human selection for survival in the Arctic and performance as sled dogs, the Qimmit deserve our efforts to ensure they continue their partnership with the Inuit people. As Dr. Feuerborn notes in her paper, this study demonstrates “the relevance of paleogenomic insight into current conversations and decisions centered around conservation and preservation of culturally significant species.”

References

1. Sonne, C. et al. Greenland sled dogs at risk of extinction. Science 360: 1080 (2018).
2. Feuerborn, T.R. et al. Origins and diversity of Greenland’s Qimmit revealed with genomes of ancient and modern sled dogs. Science 389: 163–168 (2025).
3. Mønsted, A. et al. An early Inuit workshop at a Qassi, a men’s house, Nuulliit, Northwest Greenland. Arctic Anthropol 59: 3–38 (2023).
4. Guinness World Records, “Oldest dog breed” (2020); https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/oldest-dog-breed.html.
5. Pilot, M. et al. Widespread, long-term admixture between grey wolves and domestic dogs across Eurasia and its implications for the conservation status of hybrids. Evol Appl 11: 662–680 (2018).

Below, Tatiana shared with us further details about her profile, career, prospects and future projects:  

1. Briefly introduce yourself. What is your origin story for how you got into science?
I came to ancient DNA research through a lifelong fascination with dogs. As a child, I wanted to be a veterinarian to work with animals. In school I discovered a love for history and travel. Little did I know as a child that it would be possible one day to studying archaeology and combine these interests. Today, my research focuses on the ancient DNA of Arctic dogs, where my passion for animals, curiosity about human history, and my love of travel and snow are able to come together in my work.

2. How and/or why did you start working on this project?
This project started as part of my PhD thesis that was borne out of a large project on studying the cultural and genetic origin of the Greenland Sled Dog, called the Qimmeq Project.

3. Were there any major challenges in this project? How did you overcome them?
As with all ancient DNA projects there were countless hurdles to overcome in the lab working with the samples. For me personally the biggest challenge was to do justice to the project and dogs that I cared so much about when it came to integrating a large dataset of ancient and modern genomes together and bringing results back to the communities that have cared for these dogs for millennia.

4. What do you think are the main take-home messages of this project?
I hope that this project has brought awareness of the Greenland Sled Dog to the attention of more people as these are such majestic and culturally significant dogs and shown that studying ancient populations can have tangible relevance to populations today.

5. What do you think is missing in the field that you would like to work on?
I would love to expand the research to look across the region to see in other isolated locations the unique histories of other dog populations to explore the dynamic histories of humans and their canine companions.

6. Where do you see yourself in the near future?
In the near future I see myself back in Europe expanding my research into dog history. In fact, I’m starting a new position at the University of Copenhagen and University of Greenland exploring the dogs associated with the Norse in South Greenland and the local Inuit dog populations.

After the success of last year’s Quagga Qonference, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first animal aDNA publication, we wanted to continue offering a space for stablished researchers to discuss in depth on the wider topics they focus their research. This lead to the creation of RemAaRCs, an annual space for those kinds of seminars in our mostly ECR-focused annual line-up. And we are really happy to start with two amazing speakers on a really important topic: Mutualism.

• Yvette Running Horse Collin (Taku Skan Skan Wasakliyapi, Global Insitute for Traditional Sciences)
• Ron Dunn (North Carolina State University)

If you want to discover how ancient DNA helps us understand how different species interact with each other, please, join us here.

Are you starting to work on aDNA? Are you familiar with genomics but would like to get to know how to work with degraded, low-quality genomic data? Come and join us in the first installment of AaRC’s workshop series! These workshops, aimed to provide hands-on approaches for people to get familiar with paleogenomics are online and free of charge! So please, join us and Nikolay Oskolkov (Lund University) on October 7th, 14:00, to learn how to properly process your ancient, degraded data.

To register, follow the QR code or click here

This month our AaRCTikTalks bring us 2 awesome talks from the land down under:

• Zachary Nolen - Increases in inbreeding and isolation following agricultural intensification in grassland butterflies
• Alice Dobinson - Reconstructing the Evolutionary History of Domestic Ferrets.

As with previous AaRCTikTalks, you can register to the seminar mailing list here or join our Elements, where a link will be shared minutes before it starts.

Join us in beautiful Torino, Italy, in our event Boarding the AaRC. As an ISBA associated community, AaRC will be at ISBA2025, where we will be having an special event on August 26th (2:30-4:30 CET). The main goal of this event is to allow people who didn’t got a full talk to present their research/promote their posters about animal paleogenetics, but we will also have some interesting round tables and networking before going to the conference welcome cocktail.

If this sounds interesting to you, come and join us at Aula C, Via Albertina 13. No registration needed!

Kiwi lands, Aussie wings: A story of Climate Change and flying ‘invaders’

New Zealand (Aotearoa), a remote island nation in the southwestern Pacific Ocean known for its striking natural beauty and remarkable biodiversity. Made up of two main islands, the North Island and South Island, and numerous smaller islands, New Zealand currently spans a diverse range of ecosystems, including ancient temperate rainforests, alpine environments, wetlands, coastal dunes, and grasslands. Its isolation from other landmasses for over 80 million years allowed unique plant and animal life to evolve, with a set of ecosystems largely shaped by birds rather than mammals. In this way, New Zealand’s ecosystems are not only ecologically rich but also highly sensitive to change, making them a vital focus for conservation and ecological research. Indeed, when we think of New Zealand’s birds, we often imagine its ancient, unique species, such as kiwis, the moas, or kākāpōs that seem to have evolved in complete isolation. But a recent study by our AaRC speaker Dr. Pascale Lubbe published in Molecular Ecology [1] tells a different, more dynamic story: one where climate change, rather than just time and isolation, played a starring role in shaping New Zealand’s birdlife, with Australian continental birds playing a major part in the action.  

For most of its history since its geological emergence from Zealand submerged basin due to tectonic activity around 25 million years ago [2], New Zealand landmass was dominated by dense forests. But starting around 5 million years ago, increased tectonic uplift and global cooling began transforming the landscape. As mountains rose and rain shadows formed, new ecological zones emerged. Forests gave way to scrub, tussock grasslands, and rocky alpine slopes [3]. This process only intensified during the start of the Pleistocene era around 2.5 million years ago, and by the Last Glacial Maximum around 19-29 thousand years ago, patchy forest cover was replaced extensively by open grasslands and woodland mosaics in lowland areas [4]. These new open habitats were not just physical static spaces, they were empty ecological niches awaiting to be conquered.

A couple of Tarāpunga (Red-billed Gulls, Chroicocephalus scopulinus) breeding the new generation of kiwi birds in Aotearoa (New Zealand). Picture by Dr. Pascale Lubbe.

Using both ancient DNA from fossil remains and modern mitochondrial genome sequences, Dr. Lubbe and collaborators analyzed the evolutionary histories of nearly 90 endemic New Zealand bird species. By comparing their genomes to those of their closest Australian overseas relatives, they could estimate when these species diverged. The results were striking. Many of New Zealand’s open-habitat and generalist birds diverged from their Australian relatives during the Plio-Pleistocene, especially in the early Pleistocene around 2–3 million years ago [1]. This timing aligns perfectly with the expansion of open landscapes in New Zealand, suggesting that these birds colonized newly available environments as they appeared. These birds were not evolving in place from endemic ancestors, but they were ecological opportunists, seizing the moment as the land changed. In contrast, local species currently adapted to dense forest habitats displayed a much older and more even pattern of divergence, consistent with ecological adaptation through millions of years to stable forested ecosystems. These birds were part of New Zealand’s long-term evolutionary legacy, but they were not the ones leading the conquer of new habitats.  

These results raise important questions about ecological shifts upon climate change and the fast reshaping of ecosystems that may follow. When new habitats appear, who gets to live there? locals who adapt, or newcomers who already fit the bill?  

The study by Dr. Lubbe et al. [1] provides clear evidence that in the case of New Zealand’s open landscapes, overseas colonizers won. The rapid establishment of Australian species outpaced any significant adaptive shifts among the existing fauna. While some native lineages may have diversified later in response to the new ecological conditions, the initial winners were foreigners. And as the authors mention, this is not just ancient history. In the last two centuries alone, at least 13 Australian bird species have been recorded as successfully self-introducing to New Zealand. Many of these birds are generalists or open-habitat specialists. What prompted them to this new invasion? Humans. As we cleared vast tracts of native forest, creating a mosaic of farmland, pasture, and suburban gardens, thus resembling the open Australian landscape in miniature, generalist and open land-adapted Australian birds crossing the sea found a new golden opportunity to settle in.  

While this study is rooted in ancient history, its implications are decisively modern. We are now living through one of the most rapid periods of environmental and climate change in Earth’s history, now driven by humans. As climate change continues to rise global average temperatures, forests are cleared and ecosystems are fragmented, we can expect the same evolutionary pressures to play out: some species will adapt, others will vanish, and some (especially versatile generalists) will take over, posing a great danger to the survival of endemic specialists that have slowly adapted to local ecosystems through millennia. Nevertheless, this research reminds us that invasions are not just recent, human-facilitated phenomena. They are an intrinsic part of evolutionary history. Islands like New Zealand are particularly vulnerable, as their isolated ecosystems offer few barriers to determined invaders but high stakes for native biodiversity.  

Dr. Lubbe is now embarking in new projects to understand the evolutionary history and ecological shifts of additional local Aotearoan species, like the endemic New Zealand’s gecko, the striking case of flightless passerines, liopelma forgs, and the extinct giant Haast’s eagle. We look forward to earing about her new research down under in New Zealand.

References

1. Lubbe, P., Rawlence, N. J., Dussex, N., Kardialsky, O. & Knapp, M. Plio-Pleistocene environmental changes drove the settlement of Aotearoa New Zealand by Australian open-habitat bird lineages. Mol Ecol 34, e17648. (2025).
2. Wallis, G. P. & Trewick, S. A. New Zealand phylogeography: Evolution on a small continent. Mol Ecol 18, 3548–3580 (2009).
3. Ravelo, A. C., Andreasen, D. H., Lyle, M., Lyle, A. O. & Wara, M. W. Regional climate shifts caused by gradual global cooling in the Pliocene epoch. Nature 429, 263–267 (2004).
4. Newnham, R., McGlone, M., Moar, N., Wilmshurst, J. & Vandergoes, M. The vegetation cover of New Zealand at the Last Glacial Maximum. Quat Sci Rev 74, 202–214 (2013).

Below, Pascale shared with us further details about her profile, career, prospects and future projects:  

1. Briefly introduce yourself. What is your origin story for how you got into science?
I’m lucky enough to come from a line of scientific thinkers on my mother’s side, and farmers on my father’s, so I’ve nurtured a love for the outdoors and the thrill of discovery my whole life— these twin loves manifested inevitably as a career in biology. As far as my passion for evolutionary biology, this is a bit more difficult to explain, being slightly more arcane. Maybe a romantic vision of the shadows cast by the great evolutionary thinkers in history is to blame—or a fascination with the constant flux of nature, its delicate balance and profound persistence. Who can say? Maybe it was just a notion of heading to the Galápagos myself and seeing what all that business with the finches was about with my own eyes.  

2. How and/or why did you start working on this project?
Ornithology seems a somewhat inescapable field if one is interested in evolutionary questions—birds are astounding dispersers and fabulous evolvers, especially on islands. They are remarkable weathervanes for evolutionary change, adapting rapidly in behaviour and morphology to new conditions. Where better to head than Oceania, and Aotearoa New Zealand especially, to study them? Given the nation’s long isolation from other landmasses and its dramatic geological and climatological history, it is one of nature’s most interesting laboratories. I have become very interested in the impacts of environmental change on evolutionary trajectories. Nowhere else is better to ask such questions; the stage was set, the funding available, the passion pre-supplied—and there is still much to uncover about the nature and tempo of evolution on these isles.  

3. Were there any major challenges in this project? How did you overcome them?
Of course, all scientists face challenges. We overcome them by sheer force of will, an insatiable curiosity, and implacable stubbornness. Most often we overcome them thanks to the help of our friends, colleagues, supporters, and rivals.  

4. What do you think are the main take-home messages of this project?
The key takeaway, as far as the establishment of new species in Aotearoa NZ goes, is simple: change begets change. Continued development, clearing, and anthropogenic land use will result in a New Zealand that, in the short term, becomes less distinct biologically, and more like its neighbouring landmasses. Without immediate intervention to retain, expand, and protect native habitat types, endemic species will continue to be replaced by ‘invaders’. Our work shows this is a natural process, and in time these invaders will themselves perhaps become new, unique species. Unfortunately, this will take far longer than human collective memory allows!  

5. What do you think is missing in the field that you would like to work on?
I should quite like to work on a widespread invader—the humble house sparrow—which is an astonishing generalist and inhabits an absurd range of ecosystems. There is much opportunity to marry museum collections and fresh samples to assess their genomic variability across regions and habitats. Anyone keen to write up a fellowship in a year or two?  

6. Where do you see yourself in the near future?
See above with regards to future work—which I am hoping will take me to the northern hemisphere for home base, and across the globe for sample collection. The true dream!  

7. Free space to tell something you would like to remark.
A true delight to be invited to speak. I hope to come back!