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We thank Eveline Verhulst for help with the methylome data, Christa Mateman for lab assistance, Martijn Derks for calculating the sliding windows, Tieshan Xu for the help with the Trinity assembly, Louise Dittmar for the help in dN/dS and diversity analysis, Christian Huber for help on the sweep analysis and Jun-Mo Kim who designed the SNP chip. K.M.S. was supported by a grant from the Cooperative Research Program for Agriculture Science & Technology Development (PJ009103) of the Rural Development Administration, Republic of Korea. T.I.G., P.C. and K.Z. were supported by a BBSRC grant (BB/K000209/1) and a NERC grant (NE/L005328/1) awarded to K.Z., C.J.G. was funded by Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) (NE/K01126X/1). K.J.F.V. was funded by the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research, NWO VIDI grant (864.10.008). B.C.S. was funded by ERC Advanced Grant (250164) and by a Wolfson Merit Award from the Royal Society. J.S. was funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting grant, Avian EGG (202487) and a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), The Great Tit HapMap Project (NE/J012599/1). M.E.V. was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO-VICI grant) and the European Research Council (ERC-2013-AdG 339092). [EN] For over 50 years, the great tit (Parus major) has been a model species for research in evolutionary, ecological and behavioural research; in particular, learning and cognition have been intensively studied. Here, to provide further insight into the molecular mechanisms behind these important traits, we de novo assemble a great tit reference genome and whole-genome re-sequence another 29 individuals from across Europe. We show an overrepresentation of genes related to neuronal functions, learning and cognition in regions under positive selection, as well as increased CpG methylation in these regions. In addition, great tit neuronal non-CpG methylation patterns are very similar to those observed in mammals, suggesting a universal role in neuronal epigenetic regulation which can affect learning-, memory-and experience-induced plasticity. The high-quality great tit genome assembly will play an instrumental role in furthering the integration of ecological, evolutionary, behavioural and genomic approaches in this model species.