African clawed frog
Following his PhD, Bird went on to postdoctoral research positions, first at Yale University with Joseph G. Gall, and then at the University of Zurich before returning to Edinburgh in 1975 to work at the MRC Mammalian Genome Unit, where he would stay for 11 years. It was here that Bird, along with Edwin Southern, mapped the methylation status of CpG dinucleotides along ribosomal RNA in the African clawed frog. From 1987 to 1990 Bird continued his research at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.