Section edited by David Ferrier
This section considers studies in the evolution of development and developmental processes, and into morphological evolution.
Section edited by David Ferrier
This section considers studies in the evolution of development and developmental processes, and into morphological evolution.
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The shape of the semicircular canals of the inner ear of living squamate reptiles has been used to infer phylogenetic relationships, body size, and life habits. Often these inferences are made without controll...
Sharks and rays are some of the most threatened marine taxa due to the high levels of bycatch and significant demand for meat and fin-related products in many Asian communities. At least 25% of shark and ray s...
Domestication alters several phenotypic, neurological, and physiological traits in domestic animals compared to those in their wild ancestors. Domestic ducks originated from mallards, and some studies have sho...
The ancestral presence of epithelia in Metazoa is no longer debated. Porifera seem to be one of the best candidates to be the sister group to all other Metazoa. This makes them a key taxon to explore cell-adhe...
Understanding drivers of animal biodiversity has been a longstanding aim in evolutionary biology. Insects and fishes represent the largest lineages of invertebrates and vertebrates respectively, and consequent...
The taxonomic classification of the suborder Tintinnina Kofoid & Campbell, 1929, a species-rich group of planktonic ciliated protistans with a characteristic lorica, has long been ambiguous largely due to the ...
Elongated rostra play an important role in the egg-laying of weevils, and its emergence plays a key role in the adaptive radiation of weevils. Eucryptorrhynchus scrobiculatus Motschulsky and E. brandti Harold co-...
Despite a longstanding interest in understanding how animals adapt to environments with limited nutrients, we have incomplete knowledge of the genetic basis of metabolic evolution. The Mexican tetra, Astyanax mex...
Spermatogenesis appears to be a relatively well-conserved process even among distantly related animal taxa such as invertebrates and vertebrates. Although Hymenopterans share many characteristics with other or...
The oral and pharyngeal jaw of cichlid fishes are a classic example of evolutionary modularity as their functional decoupling boosted trophic diversification and contributed to the success of cichlid adaptive ...
Lemurs once rivalled the diversity of rest of the primate order despite thier confinement to the island of Madagascar. We test the adaptive radiation model of Malagasy lemur diversity using a novel combinatio...
Pelvic brooding is a form of uni-parental care, and likely evolved in parallel in two lineages of Sulawesi ricefishes. Contrary to all other ricefishes, females of pelvic brooding species do not deposit eggs a...
Placentation has evolved multiple times among both chordates and invertebrates. Although they are structurally less complex, invertebrate placentae are much more diverse in their origin, development and positi...
It has been proposed that recently duplicated genes are more likely to be redundant with one another compared to ancient paralogues. The evolutionary logic underpinning this idea is simple, as the assumption i...
Ciliated protists, a huge assemblage of unicellular eukaryotes, are extremely diverse and play important ecological roles in most habitats where there is sufficient moisture for their survivals. Even though th...
Strongyllodes variegatus (Fairmaire) is a major insect pest of oilseed rape in China. Despite its economic importance, the contribution of its population genetics in the development of any suitable protection con...
How vascular systems and their respiratory pigments evolved is still debated. While many animals present a vascular system, hemoglobin exists as a blood pigment only in a few groups (vertebrates, annelids, a f...
Although Trapa is a well-defined genus of distinctive freshwater plants with accumulations of extensive morphological and embryological autapomorphies, its phylogenetic relationships have long been unclear. Forme...
Leaves have highly diverse morphologies. However, with an evolutionary history of approximately 200 million years, leaves of the pine family are relatively monotonous and often collectively called “needles”, a...
The primordial eye field of the vertebrate embryo is a single entity of retinal progenitor cells spanning the anterior neural plate before bifurcating to form bilateral optic vesicles. Here we review fate mapp...
Nervous system development is an interplay of many processes: the formation of individual neurons, which depends on whole-body and local patterning processes, and the coordinated growth of neurites and synapse...
In this study, we investigate species limits in the cyanobacterial lichen genus Rostania (Collemataceae, Peltigerales, Lecanoromycetes). Four molecular markers (mtSSU rDNA, β-tubulin, MCM7, RPB2) were sequenced a...
Amber has been reported from the Early Cretaceous Crato Formation, as isolated clasts or within plant tissues. Undescribed cones of uncertain gymnosperm affinity have also been recovered with amber preserved i...
Pseudogamy is a reproductive system in which females rely on the sperm of males to activate their oocytes, generally parasitizing males of other species, but do not use the sperm DNA. The nematode Mesorhabditis b...
Adaptive radiations are characterized by extreme and/or iterative phenotypic divergence; however, such variation does not accumulate evenly across an organism. Instead, it is often partitioned into sub-units, ...
Hypotrichia are a group with the most complex morphology and morphogenesis within the ciliated protists. The classification of Gastrostyla-like species, a taxonomically difficult group of hypotrichs with a common...
Diverse architectures of nervous systems (NSs) such as a plexus in cnidarians or a more centralized nervous system (CNS) in insects and vertebrates are present across Metazoa, but it is unclear what selection ...
Fangs are a putative key innovation that revolutionized prey capture and feeding in snakes, and – along with their associated venom phenotypes – have made snakes perhaps the most medically-significant vertebra...
Metamorphosis remains one of the most complicated and poorly understood processes in insects. This is particularly so for the very dynamic transformations that take place within the pupal sheath of holometabol...
Poecilogony, the presence of two developmental modes in the same animal species, is a rare phenomenon. Few cases of poecilogony have been suggested for marine invertebrates including molluscs and even less sto...
The remarkable abilities of the human brain are distinctive features that set us apart from other animals. However, our understanding of how the brain has changed in the human lineage remains incomplete, but i...
The diversification process known as the Lake Tanganyika Radiation has given rise to the most speciose clade of African cichlids. Almost all cichlid species found in the lakes Tanganyika, Malawi and Victoria, ...
The Chengjiang biota is one of the most species-rich Cambrian Konservat-Lagerstätten, and preserves a community dominated by non-biomineralized euarthropods. However, several Chengjiang euarthropods have an un...
Tooth morphology within theropod dinosaurs has been extensively investigated and shows high disparity throughout the Cretaceous. Changes or diversification in feeding ecology, i.e., adoption of an herbivorous ...
Evolutionary transitions in temporal niche necessitates specialized morphology, physiology, and behaviors. Diurnal, heliothermic squamates (lizards and snakes) that bask require protection from ultraviolet rad...
Bird plumage exhibits a diversity of colors that serve functional roles ranging from signaling to camouflage and thermoregulation. However, birds must maintain a balance between evolving colorful signals to at...
Temperature exerts a strong influence on protein evolution: species living in thermally distinct environments often exhibit adaptive differences in protein structure and function. However, previous research on...
The evolution of the Jehol Biota of western Liaoning in China includes three phases, initiation in the Dabeigou phase, radiation in the Yixian phase, and decline in the Jiufotang phase. Numerous ephedroid macr...
Chondrichthyans represent a monophyletic group of crown group gnathostomes and are central to our understanding of vertebrate evolution. Like all vertebrates, cartilaginous fishes evolved concretions of materi...
Palaeognathae is a basal clade within Aves and include the large and flightless ratites and the smaller, volant tinamous. Although much research has been conducted on various aspects of palaeognath morphology,...
Recently we proposed an evolutionary explanation for a spinal pathology that afflicts many people, intervertebral disc herniation (Plomp et al. [2015] BMC Evolutionary Biology 15, 68). Using 2D data, we found tha...
Many pathologies that modify the shell geometry and ornamentation of ammonoids are known from the fossil record. Since they may reflect the developmental response of the organism to a perturbation (usually a s...
Two previous studies on interspecific body size variation of anurans found that the key drivers of variation are the species’ lifestyles and the environments that they live in. To examine whether those finding...
Parasite attachment structures are critical traits that influence effective host exploitation and survival. Morphology of attachment structures can reinforce host specificity and niche specialisation, or even ...
Tardigrada is a group of microscopic invertebrates distributed worldwide in permanent and temporal aquatic habitats. Famous for their extreme stress tolerance, tardigrades are also of interest due to their clo...
Odontocetes (toothed whales) are the most species-rich marine mammal lineage. The catalyst for their evolutionary success is echolocation - a form of biological sonar that uses high-frequency sound, produced i...
Hybridization has been widely practiced in plant and animal breeding as a means to enhance the quality and fitness of the organisms. In domestic equids, this hybrid vigor takes the form of improved physical an...
Understanding the mechanisms promoting or constraining morphological diversification within clades is a central topic in evolutionary biology. Ecological transitions are of particular interest because of their...
The annelid anterior central nervous system is often described to consist of a dorsal prostomial brain, consisting of several commissures and connected to the ventral ganglionic nerve cord via circumesophageal...
Little is known about the long-term patterns of body size evolution in Crocodylomorpha, the > 200-million-year-old group that includes living crocodylians and their extinct relatives. Extant crocodylians are m...
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