Volume 4 Issue 9, September 2020

Reduced human mobility during the pandemic will reveal critical aspects of our impact on animals, providing important guidance on how best to share space on this crowded planet.

The genome sequence of the algal species Prasinoderma coloniale reveals a novel phylum of green plants.

Recent institutional and vertebrate conservation scientists’ publication data suggest that China has a growing conservation research capacity deficit. Here the authors outline steps China must take to build up this capacity in order to safeguard the country’s exceptionally rich biodiversity.

Vaccines that can spread autonomously through animal populations could help to prevent zoonoses before they spillover into humans. This Perspective discusses the epidemiological theory and the practical challenges associated with transmissible and transferable vaccines.

The costs of echolocation during flight were thought to be negligible for bats, but here it is shown that this is true only below a certain intensity threshold. Above 130 dB, the costs of sound production become too expensive for small bats.

Three-dimensional reconstructions of Homo erectus, Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal suggest a recent evolutionary origin for the comparatively shallow modern human thorax.

Unstable and harsh climates have been implicated as partial causes of Neanderthal demise. Here a speleothem palaeoenvironmental record spanning the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition attests to stable and moderate conditions in the Mediterranean during this time suggesting a more complicated picture than previously thought.

Analysing data on egg size and planktonic duration from >750 marine species with a larval period, the authors show that temperature, life-history and oceanographic processes interact to shape peaks of dispersal at low and high latitudes.

An analysis across multiple species groups and different facets of stand-level heterogeneity in temperate forests from Central Europe reveals that heterogeneity–diversity relationships are not generalizable and predictable as modelling approaches suggest, varying even between ecologically similar species groups.

Phylogenetic analysis shows that site-exclusion methods produce erratic phylogenetic estimates of mitochondrial origin and support an origin of mitochondria within Alphaproteobacteria.

Genome analysis of the pico-eukaryotic marine green alga Prasinoderma coloniale CCMP 1413 unveils the existence of a novel phylum within green plants (Viridiplantae), the Prasinodermophyta, which diverged before the split of Chlorophyta and Streptophyta.

A new study of the divergence time of angiosperm families shows that although most angiosperm families originated during the middle Cretaceous (~100–90 million years ago), the diversification of families into extant diversity was delayed until the Palaeocene (~66–56 million years ago), this time lag being geographically heterogeneous, and longer in tropical than in temperate and arid biomes.

Invasion of land required changes of vertebrate metabolism. Here, the authors report a pathway for sulfur metabolism present in chick embryos but not in mammals, which originated around 300 million years ago in a proto-reptile.

Manipulation of Hh and other genes involved in neural development of the chordate amphioxus reveals conservation and differences in neural patterning mechanisms between vertebrates and amphioxus.

Discovery cohorts from three continents, plus experiments in mouse models, are used to identify microbial species and mechanisms involved in post-antibiotic gut community recovery.

The cost of the same antibiotic resistance mutation in the mouse gut is shown to vary between hosts as the result of differences in microbiota.