Volume 7 Issue 1, January 2023

An actinopterygian fossil with unexpected anatomical features from 7 million years before the end-Devonian mass extinction suggests complex patterns of divergence and diversification around the Devonian/Carboniferous boundary for ray-finned fishes.

Cratonavis zhui, a bird from the Early Cretaceous of China, preserves a combination of non-avialan theropod skull features and a bird-like post-cranial skeleton.

Combining modelling of living human participants and chimpanzees with analysis of fossil hominin trackways, the authors distinguish between the earliest evidence of modern human-like bipedal kinematics and earlier hominin precursors.

Comparing the brain anatomy of fossil hominins and extant primates, the authors determine that strong covariation between different areas of the brain in Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis evolved under higher evolutionary rates than in any other primate. Strong covariation is present in juvenile and adult H. sapiens, and in juvenile but not adult great apes.

Bringing together multiple models and databases on nature’s contributions to people, the authors map these contributions globally and determine the critical areas where their magnitude is the highest and where they provide the highest potential human benefit.

An Indonesia-wide analysis identifies locations for potential mangrove restoration, ranked by scenarios of success likelihood according to biogeomorphology, current and past land use and land tenure, and estimates the restoration costs.

Analysing a global dataset of >24,000 observations of coral reef benthic cover, the authors show that high macroalgal cover is largely restricted to the Western Atlantic, where alongside the Central Pacific there have also been marked declines in coral cover since the late 1990s.

In a replicated ecosystem-scale natural experiment across ten islands in the Indian Ocean, invasive black rats disrupted nutrients provided by seabirds, leading to a coral reef fish having larger territories and investing less time in aggression than on rat-free islands.

Data from three citizen science programmes on the occurrence, abundance, community structure and demography of birds across the UK show that protected areas are associated with improved state for most species and provide the most benefit to specialist, rare and declining species.

The authors resample a plant–pollinator network that was initially characterized by a naturalist in the late nineteenth century in Finland. They find that only 7% of the original interactions persisted; generally, specialist pollinators disproportionally declined while generalist muscoid flies increased as the abundant pollinators.

In a widespread sampling campaign across urban soils, the authors find that soil biodiversity, but not plant diversity, is positively related to multiple ecosystem functions in urban environments.

Using synthetic human gut communities and computational modelling, the authors show that increasing the complexity of dietary carbohydrates reduces microbial growth, balances positive and negative interspecies interactions, and reduces community sensitivity to perturbations.

Barcode lineage tracking of a competitive mutualism between Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Chlamydomonas reinhardtii shows that selection favours yeast mutants that increase the yields of both species and strengthen the mutualism.

The authors develop a new metric to measure the error-corrected convergence rate of protein evolution, together with a heuristic algorithm to detect signals of adaptive protein convergence.