Evolutionary developmental biology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fossil juvenile Mesozoic birds are exceedingly rare and can provide important insight into the early evolution of avian development. Here, Knoll et al. describe one of the smallest known Mesozoic avians, which indicates a clade-wide asynchronous pattern of osteogenesis and great variation in basal bird hatchling size and skeletal maturation tempo.

    • Fabien Knoll
    • , Luis M. Chiappe
    •  & Jose Luis Sanz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Three alternatives have been proposed for the ecological state of the ancestral snake: fossorial (burrowing), aquatic, or terrestrial. Here, the authors use an integrative geometric morphometric approach that suggests evolution from terrestrial to fossorial in the most recent common ancestor of extant snakes.

    • Filipe O. Da Silva
    • , Anne-Claire Fabre
    •  & Nicolas Di-Poï

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Developmental processes often involve nonlinearities, but the consequences for translating genotype to phenotype are not well characterized. Here, Green et al. vary Fgf8 signaling across allelic series of mice and show that phenotypic robustness in craniofacial shape is explained by a nonlinear effect of Fgf8 expression.

    • Rebecca M. Green
    • , Jennifer L. Fish
    •  & Benedikt Hallgrímsson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Planarian regenerative mechanisms suggest that muscle has an instructive role in patterning. Here, the authors show that muscle is also responsible for regenerative patterning information in an early-branching bilaterian, Hofstenia miamia, dating this back to the dawn of the Bilateria, over 550 million years ago.

    • Amelie A. Raz
    • , Mansi Srivastava
    •  & Peter W. Reddien

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Genetic accommodation is a potential mechanism for the phenotypic divergence of species. Here, Kulkarni et al. compare endocrine responses of three spadefoot toad species to pond drying and suggest how evolution of mechanisms of developmental plasticity may account for trait variation among species.

    • Saurabh S. Kulkarni
    • , Robert J. Denver
    •  & Daniel R. Buchholz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The transcription factor Nkx2.5 is essential for heart development. Here, the authors identify a previously unknown expression domain for Nkx2.5 in the emu wing and explore its role in diminished wing bud development in the flightless emu, compared with three other birds that have functional wings.

    • Peter G. Farlie
    • , Nadia M. Davidson
    •  & Craig A. Smith

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In animals with complex life cycles, selection on one life phase may constrain adaptation in another phase. Here the authors find that, during the adaptive radiation of mantellid frogs, the evolution of tadpole and adult morphologies has been uncoupled through phase-specific gene expression.

    • Katharina C. Wollenberg Valero
    • , Joan Garcia-Porta
    •  & Miguel Vences

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rotifers are microscopic animals with an unusual, nonsegmented body plan consisting of a head, trunk and foot. Here, Fröbius and Funch investigate the role of Hox genes—which are widely used in animal body plan patterning—in rotifer embryogenesis and find non-canonical expression in the nervous system.

    • Andreas C. Fröbius
    •  & Peter Funch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The phenolic polymer lignin is thought to have contributed to adaptation of early land plants to terrestrial environments. Here Renaultet al. show that moss, which does not produce lignin, contains an ancestral phenolic metabolism pathway that produces a phenol-enriched cuticle and prevents desiccation.

    • Hugues Renault
    • , Annette Alber
    •  & Danièle Werck-Reichhart

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The development of mature vocal patterns is shaped by parental influence in many animals. Here, Gultekin and Hage show that parental feedback not only influences vocal development, but is indeed necessary for juvenile marmosets to acquire normal vocal behaviour.

    • Yasemin B. Gultekin
    •  & Steffen R. Hage

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Salamanders are unique among extant tetrapods for their ability to completely regenerate their limbs. Here, Nogueira and colleagues show that lungfishes, the sister clade of tetrapods, regenerate their fins using analogous gene regulatory changes and morphological steps.

    • Acacio F. Nogueira
    • , Carinne M. Costa
    •  & Igor Schneider

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The evolution of germ cell specification by maternal germ plasm has been proposed to accelerate vertebrate protein evolution by liberating selective constraints. Whittle and Extavour analyse global rates of protein evolution and find no support for this hypothesis in vertebrates or invertebrates.

    • Carrie A. Whittle
    •  & Cassandra G. Extavour

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In honeybees, pheromones produced by the queen inhibit reproduction by workers and enforce a eusocial division of labour. Here, Duncan, Hyink and Dearden show that this inhibition is mediated by the Notch signalling pathway in the workers' ovaries.

    • Elizabeth J. Duncan
    • , Otto Hyink
    •  & Peter K. Dearden

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Transcription factors Distal-less(Dll) and spalt were co-opted during the evolution of butterfly eyespots. Here, Zhang and Reed use CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to show that while spalt is a positive regulator of eyespots as predicted, Dll knockouts have positive effects on both eyespot size and number, thus suggesting that Dllis an eyespot repressor, not an activator as previously thought.

    • Linlin Zhang
    •  & Robert D. Reed

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In vertebrate embryos, Wnt/β-catenin signaling induces an organizer area guiding the formation of body axes and inducing extra axes upon transplantation. Here, Kraus et al. show that Wnt ligands also induce an organizer in a sea anemone, indicating that the organizer dates back over 600 million years.

    • Yulia Kraus
    • , Andy Aman
    •  & Grigory Genikhovich

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The presence of a pulmonary system in fossil coelacanths has only recently been identified, with little known about homologues in living species. Here, Cupello et al. confirm the presence of a lung in the extant species Latimeria chalumnaeand report its growth during different stages of development.

    • Camila Cupello
    • , Paulo M. Brito
    •  & Gaël Clément

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The evolution of the amniote middle ear remains unclear. Here, the authors show that inactivation of the Edn1-Dlx5/6 cascade during development results in loss of the tympanic membrane in mouse and duplication in chicken, which suggests independent evolution of the tympanic membrane in different amniotes.

    • Taro Kitazawa
    • , Masaki Takechi
    •  & Hiroki Kurihara

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Claspers are copulatory organs found in male cartilaginous fishes. Here, the authors show that androgen receptor signalling maintains the Shh pathway to promote clasper development in male skates and suggest the importance of hormonal regulation in the evolution of male copulatory organs.

    • Katherine L. O’Shaughnessy
    • , Randall D. Dahn
    •  & Martin J. Cohn

  • Article |

    Despite apparent morphological diversity, developmental interactions create predictable patterns of variation. Here the authors show that variation in the proportion of limbs, digits and somites and their response to artificial selection follow a rule that predicts the size of sequentially forming structures.

    • Nathan M. Young
    • , Benjamin Winslow
    •  & Kathryn Kavanagh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is unclear whether the embryonic origin of skull bones is evolutionarily conserved. Here, the authors show that the pattern of cranial development of the Mexican axolotl is similar to that reported for other vertebrates, but the pattern in the African clawed frog, another amphibian, is unique.

    • Nadine Piekarski
    • , Joshua B. Gross
    •  & James Hanken

  • Article |

    Fishes have diverse colour patterns, yet the mechanisms of pattern diversification are poorly understood. Here, the authors show that the uniform pigment pattern in Danio albolineatus is established by an early differentiation of xanthophores controlled by cis regulatory changes at the csf1alocus.

    • Larissa B. Patterson
    • , Emily J. Bain
    •  & David M. Parichy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ornamental twin-tail goldfish has a bifurcated caudal skeleton that arose during domestication, but the developmental mechanisms that generate this tail are unknown. Here, Abe et al. show that a mutation in the chordingene affects embryonic dorsal–ventral patterning causing the bifurcated tail skeleton.

    • Gembu Abe
    • , Shu-Hua Lee
    •  & Kinya G. Ota

  • Article |

    The evolutionary origins of the chordate neural tube and notochord are unclear. Here the authors show the expression patterns of chordate patterning genes in a hemichordate, which suggest that the hemichordate endoderm and collar cord might be homologous to the chordate notochord and neural tube, respectively.

    • Norio Miyamoto
    •  & Hiroshi Wada

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