Systematics and taxonomy in scuttle flies

After over a year off from work, I am now continuing my project. The next few weeks I will be writing my introductionary essay - something every PhD student at Stockholm Universtity's Zoology department has to do. Something that I should have done a long time ago but that I somehow managed to avoid until now. 

I am more looking forward to revisiting the problematic genus Megaselia, however. Next in line is a paper on a species group within Megaselia that I will be working on together with Sven-Olof Ulefors. 

Ullasa Kondandaramaiah defended his thesis "The dispersal-vicariance pendulum and butterfly biogeography" today. While this is not really a subject that I am studying, it still raised a lot of questions that I would love to be able to find answers to, here are some of them:

How many fossils of phorids are there laying around somewhere? How many different species have been described from amber fossils? How closely related are they to some extant species? How old are the oldest fossils?

I never thought that I would be writing a blog. I have been following some blogs, not very many, but the idea never really got to me that this might actually be a thing that I would enjoy doing. We will see, a lot of blogs probably start with exactly that very thought and with in-advance-apologies for not continuing the blog. Let's just wait and see where this one is going!

I hope that writing about my PhD project will help me to remember thoughts and ideas about the project. Maybe it will even give me the opportunity to learn about other PhD student in the same area, who knows?