Today is a big day for the genomics of egg-laying animals, with the coordinated publication of three papers on animal sex chromosome evolution and diversity in GigaScience , Nature , and Genome Research by the Qi Zhou lab at Zhejiang University.

The Penguin Genome Consortium sequences all living penguin species genomes to understand the evolution of life on the ice. Published today in GigaScience is an article that presents the first effort to capture the entirety of the genomic landscape of all living penguin species.

Painting of the Eastern Yellow Robin by Prof Paul Sunnucks. Today in Gigascience we published an avian genome assembly with a twist. An Australian team at Monash University discovered unusual, so-called neo-sex chromosomes in the genome of the Eastern Yellow Robin. Being big fans of bird genomes (see our support of the Avian Phylogenomic and B10K projects) it is great to see another one take flight.

While they say one swallow doesn’t make a spring, one swallow genome makes a welcome contribution to the avian genome club. Taking advantage of the latest genomic and optical mapping technologies, a team of Scientists from the University of Milan, California State Polytechnic University and the University of Pavia, have carried out the high quality sequencing of the barn swallow genome, published today in Gigascience.

**OPTIMising Genome Assembly **This month brings new additions to our exciting and on-going Optical Mapping series. Outside of a handful of key genomes, due to deficiencies in the short sequencing read lengths that have backed genome assembly, we lack reference genomes that are finished to high standards that can support comprehensive analyses.

**Bird Genomes Rule the Roost **Yesterday marked the announcement by Guojie Zhang (pictured) in Nature of the launch of the Bird 10,000 genomes (B10K) project (see: http://b10k.genomics.cn/), an initiative to generate representative draft genome sequences from all bird species within the next five years. This ambitious project is the first attempt to sequence the genomes of all living species of a vertebrate class.

Tītitipounamu, Rifleman, female (left) and male (right) Our New Zealand based Commissioning Editor, Nicole Nogoy, was asked by Creative Commons Aotearoa (New Zealand) to write a guest blog on open licensing from a Kiwi perspective. Being big users and fans of their licenses we were happy to oblige.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.