Featured
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Article |
Species-specific responses of Late Quaternary megafauna to climate and humans
- Eline D. Lorenzen
- , David Nogués-Bravo
- & Eske Willerslev
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Brief Communications Arising |
Competition, predation and natural selection in island lizards
- Jonathan B. Losos
- & Robert M. Pringle
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Letter |
Excess digestive capacity in predators reflects a life of feast and famine
- Jonathan B. Armstrong
- & Daniel E. Schindler
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Letter |
Species–area relationships always overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss
- Fangliang He
- & Stephen P. Hubbell
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News |
Antarctic microbes live life to the extreme
Chilean Antarctic survey finds dramatic variety of organisms adapted to unusual conditions.
- Patricio Segura Ortiz
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News |
Virus-eater discovered in Antarctic lake
First of the parasitic parasites to be discovered in a natural environment points to hidden diversity.
- Virginia Gewin
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News |
Frightened birds grow longer wings
Offspring of predator-stressed mothers grow their wings more quickly than chicks from predator-free females.
- Matt Kaplan
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Books & Arts |
Books in brief
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News |
Wasps clock faces like humans
Face recognition in golden paper wasps may be an adaptation to their social environment.
- Alla Katsnelson
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News |
African elephants are two distinct species
Genomic analysis shows split happened much earlier than previously thought.
- Natasha Gilbert
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Research Highlights |
Evolution and ecology: Twisted tale of snail evolution
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Research Highlights |
Ecology: Reptiles rose after forests died
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News |
Left turn saves snails from snakes
Snail species evolved a 'counter-coil' to evade predators' uneven bite.
- Joseph Milton
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Research Highlights |
Evolutionary ecology: Chasing off biters benefits others
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Letter |
Early oxygenation of the terrestrial environment during the Mesoproterozoic
It is thought that rises in atmospheric oxygen concentrations occurred about 2.3 and 0.8 billion years ago, with the latter implicated in the subsequent evolutionary expansion of complex biota. Sulphur isotope fractionation data from an ancient sedimentary succession in Scotland now suggest that the terrestrial environment was already sufficiently oxygenated to support a biota adapted to an oxygen-rich atmosphere about 1.2 billion years ago.
- John Parnell
- , Adrian J. Boyce
- & Sam Spinks
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Letter |
Higher rates of sex evolve in spatially heterogeneous environments
Direct experimental tests of the conditions under which sex evolves have been rare. These authors evolve populations of a facultatively sexual rotifer in homogeneous and heterogeneous environments and show that the latter promotes sex.
- Lutz Becks
- & Aneil F. Agrawal
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News |
Plants set stage for evolutionary drama
Oxygen increase triggered by vascular plants enabled the development of complex animals.
- Joseph Milton
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News |
Amphibians wiped out before they are discovered
Fungal disease drives the loss of 30 species in Panama.
- Janet Fang
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News |
Evolutionary insights caught on camera
Spying on wild crickets in the field yields secrets of reproductive success.
- Janelle Weaver
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Letter |
Small mammal diversity loss in response to late-Pleistocene climatic change
Many large mammals became extinct worldwide at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, around 12,000 years ago. Here, it is shown that smaller mammals, which often provide much more comprehensive fossil records than large mammals, were much less likely to respond to the Pleistocene–Holocene transition by becoming extinct. Instead, diversity and evenness suffered, so that less abundant species became rarer, with more generalist 'weedy' species becoming more common.
- Jessica L. Blois
- , Jenny L. McGuire
- & Elizabeth A. Hadly
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News & Views |
A flourishing of fish forms
According to an innovative exercise in 'morphospace analysis', modern fish owe their stunning diversity in part to an ecological cleaning of the slate by the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.
- Michael Alfaro
- & Francesco Santini
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Research Highlights |
Evolutionary biology: Lend a helping claw