Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Rapid morphological evolution in early echinoderms was later outpaced by increases in ecological diversification, indicating the phylum exhibited morphological volatility and ecological constraints at its origin.
The authors use US Breeding Bird Survey data to quantify the losses and gains in bird species richness that have not yet been realized owing to ecological time lags following past land use changes.
Comparing anatomy and life habits for fossil echinoderms spanning the Cambrian to Ordovician periods, the authors show that anatomical form and functional diversity are decoupled, and ecological innovation is constrained.
Historical accounts of the mortality outcomes of the Black Death plague pandemic are variable across Europe, with much higher death tolls suggested in some areas than others. Here the authors use a ‘big data palaeoecology’ approach to show that land use change following the pandemic was spatially variable across Europe, confirming heterogeneous responses with empirical data.
The authors report a new genus and species of titanosaurian sauropod, Abditosaurus kuehnei, from the Late Cretaceous (ca. 70.5 Ma) of Spain. A. kuehnei groups phylogenetically with South American and African taxa, suggesting geographical connectivity between Africa and Europe at this time.
The authors show that an ecosystem’s sensitivity to drought, measured as the amount of change in vegetation moisture content for a given change in background moisture, predicts the fire hazard in that location.
A landscape-level natural experiment in free-ranging pumas reveals how changes in hunting pressure alter viral evolution and infection dynamics through indirect effects on puma population size, demography and behaviour.
New radiocarbon dates for the Mesolithic cemetery of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov suggest that the main use of the site spanned only a few centuries, centring on a northern hemisphere climatic downturn event.
By conducting viral phylodynamic analysis on samples of puma feline immunodeficiency virus from regions with and without puma hunting, the authors show that stopping hunting disrupts male social structure and in turn influences viral dynamics.