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We investigate the role of ecological di¡erentiation in cladogenesis of a monophyletic group of North American tiger beetles, the subgenus Ellipsoptera (genus: Cicindela), by reconstructing their species-level phylogeny from mitochondrial DNA sequences. Observed reconstructions of ecological characters on the phylogeny are compared to those expected under simple null models of no association with cladogenesis. We ¢nd no evidence that ecological disparity is associated with either species coexistence, speciation or long-term persistence and/or radiation of lineages. Ecomorphological traits have evolved in response to di¡erences in habitat occupied by species, but without detectable relationship with cladogenesis.

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1. Insect declines are a global issue with significant ecological and economic ramifications. Yet, we have a poor understanding of the genomic impact these losses can have. Genome-wide data from historical specimens have the potential to provide baselines of population genetic measures to study population change, with natural history collections representing large repositories of such specimens. However, an initial challenge in conducting historical DNA data analyses is to understand how molecular preservation varies between specimens.2. Here, we highlight how Next-Generation Sequencing methods developed for studying archaeological samples can be applied to determine DNA preservation from only a single leg taken from entomological museum specimens, some of which are more than a century old. An analysis of genome-wide data from a set of 113 red-tailed bumblebee Bombus lapidarius specimens, from five British museum collections, was used to quantify DNA preservation over time.Additionally, to improve our analysis and further enable future research, we generated a novel assembly of the red-tailed bumblebee genome.3. Our approach shows that museum entomological specimens are comprised of short DNA fragments with mean lengths below 100 base pairs (BP), suggesting

1. Determining when animal populations have experienced stress in the past is fundamental to understanding how risk factors drive contemporary and future species' responses to environmental change. For insects, quantifying stress and associating it with environmental factors has been challenging due to a paucity of time-series data and because detectable population-level responses can show varying lag effects. One solution is to leverage historic entomological specimens to detect morphological proxies of stress experienced at the time stressors emerged, allowing us to more accurately determine population responses.2. Here we studied specimens of four bumblebee species, an invaluable group of insect pollinators, from five museums collected across Britain over the 20th century. We calculated the degree of fluctuating asymmetry (FA; random deviations from bilateral symmetry) between the right and left forewings as a potential proxy of developmental stress.3. We: (a) investigated whether baseline FA levels vary between species, and how this compares between the first and second half of the century; (b) determined the extent of FA change over the century in the four bumblebee species, and whether this followed a linear or nonlinear trend; (c) tested which annual climatic conditions correlated with increased FA in bumblebees.

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It is generally agreed that the artistic world of eighteenth-century Brazil was dominated by the sculptor/architect, Antônio Francisco Lisboa—“O Aleijadinho” (“the little cripple”)—who has been called one of the most important artists ever to develop in Latin America. The peculiar circumstances of his life, combined with his obvious artistic genius, have resulted in considerable scholarly interest and study. The annotated bibliography that brought Aleijadinho scholarship from 1940 through 1973, in combination with the earlier bibliographies of Martins and Smith-Wilder, provides a relatively complete chronicling of works dealing exclusively with A. F. Lisboa.