Evolutionary ecology articles within Nature Geoscience

Featured

  • News & Views |

    Identifying the metal micronutrients required by early life could help to illuminate how primitive organisms arose, but which metals were biologically available in ancient seawater has not been determined. A new experimental framework suggests how the precipitation of iron minerals from seawater reduced the availability of key metals, particularly zinc, copper and vanadium.

    • Jena E. Johnson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Over the past 620,000 years, three distinct phases of climate variability in eastern Africa coincided with shifts in hominin evolution and dispersal, according to an analysis of environmental proxy records from a core collected in the Chew Bahir basin of Ethiopia.

    • Verena Foerster
    • , Asfawossen Asrat
    •  & Martin H. Trauth

  • Review Article |

    Species richness in mountain environments is linked to mountain-building and climatic processes, an integration of geological, climatic, and biological datasets reveals.

    • Alexandre Antonelli
    • , W. Daniel Kissling
    •  & Carina Hoorn

  • Review Article |

    The oxygenation of the Earth's deep oceans is often thought to have triggered the evolution of simple animals. A review article proposes that instead, the evolution of animal life set off a series of biogeochemical feedbacks that promoted the oxygenation of the deep sea.

    • Timothy M. Lenton
    • , Richard A. Boyle
    •  & Nicholas J. Butterfield

  • Review Article |

    Over 90% of species were lost during the end-Permian mass extinction. A review of the fossil record shows that the rate of recovery was highly variable between different groups of organisms as a result of complex biotic interactions and repeated environmental perturbations.

    • Zhong-Qiang Chen
    •  & Michael J. Benton

  • Article |

    Ocean acidification may seriously impair marine calcifying organisms. Emiliania huxleyi, the world’s single most important calcifying organism, may be able to evolve in response to ocean acidification conditions, according to laboratory selection experiments.

    • Kai T. Lohbeck
    • , Ulf Riebesell
    •  & Thorsten B. H. Reusch

  • Review Article |

    Throughout the Palaeozoic era, about 540 to 250 million years ago, plants colonized land and rapidly diversified. An analysis of the palaeontologic record shows that this diversification irrevocably altered the shape and form of fluvial systems.

    • Martin R. Gibling
    •  & Neil S. Davies

  • News & Views |

    The rate at which new marine animals evolve has varied through time, but the factors that ultimately drive these fluctuations are unclear. A statistical analysis shows that global changes in abiotic factors play an important role.

    • Wolfgang Kiessling

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