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The dentitions of extinct organisms can provide pivotal information regarding their phylogenetic position, as well as paleobiology, diet, development, and growth. Extant birds are edentulous (toothless), but t...
Larvae of the Holarctic mayfly genus Rhithrogena Eaton, 1881 (Ephemeroptera, Heptageniidae) are a diverse and abundant member of stream and river communities and are routinely used as bio-indicators of water qual...
Studies of geographic variation can provide insight into the evolutionary processes involved in the early stages of biological diversification. In particular, multiple, replicated cases of geographic trait div...
The last time the phylogenetic relationships among members of the family Hemerobiidae were studied quantitatively was over 12 years ago and based exclusively on morphology. Our study builds upon this morpholog...
Adaptive divergence, which usually explains rapid diversification within island species, might involve the positive selection of genes. Anthocyanin biosynthetic pathway (ABP) genes are important for floral div...
The disproportionate species richness of the world’s biodiversity hotspots could be explained by low extinction (the evolutionary “museum”) and/or high speciation (the “hot-bed”) models. We test these models u...
Centromeres are essential for accurate chromosome segregation, yet sequence conservation is low even among closely related species. Centromere drive predicts rapid turnover because some centromeric sequences m...
Archosauromorpha originated in the middle–late Permian, radiated during the Triassic, and gave rise to the crown group Archosauria, a highly successful clade of reptiles in terrestrial ecosystems over the last...
Studies of the biogeographic distribution of seed oil content in plants are fundamental to understanding the mechanisms of adaptive evolution in plants as seed oil is the primary energy source needed for germi...
Phylogeography and historical demography of the cyprinid fish Diptychus maculatus (subfamily Schizothoracinae) are evaluated across three river systems in the Northern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) and Tien Shan ...
Distributions of European fish species were shaped by glaciations and the geological history of river networks until human activities partially abrogated the restrictions of biogeographical regions. The nearby...
Co-dispersal of sperm-dependent hybrids and their sexual relatives is expected to result in consistent spatial patterns between assemblages of hybrids and genetic structure of parental species. However, local ...
Cassava mosaic disease (CMD) in Madagascar is caused by a complex of at least six African cassava mosaic geminivirus (CMG) species. This provides a rare opportunity for a comparative study of the evolutionary ...
The Bryozoa (=Ectoprocta) is a large group of bilaterians that exhibit great variability in the innervation of tentacles and in the organization of the cerebral ganglion. Investigations of bryozoans from diffe...
Curious parallels between the processes of species and language evolution have been observed by many researchers. Retracing the evolution of Indo-European (IE) languages remains one of the most intriguing inte...
Colour polymorphic species provide invaluable insight into processes that generate and maintain intra-specific variation. Despite an increasing understanding of the genetic basis of discrete morphs, sources of...
The subterranean blind mole rat, Spalax (genus Nannospalax) endures extreme hypoxic conditions and fluctuations in oxygen levels that threaten DNA integrity. Nevertheless, Spalax is long-lived, does not develop s...
Multiple animal species exhibit morphological asymmetries in male genitalia. In insects, left-right genital asymmetries evolved many times independently and have been proposed to appear in response to changes ...
The effect of anthropogenic environments on the function of the vertebrate immune system is a problem of general importance. For example, it relates to the increasing rates of immunologically-based disease in ...
On account of repeated exposure and submergence of the East China Sea (ECS) land bridge, sea level fluctuation played an important role in shaping the population structure of many temperate species across the ...
In mouse ES cells, the function of Sox2 is essential for the maintenance of pluripotency. Since the Sox-family of transcription factors are well conserved in the animal kingdom, addressing the evolutionary ori...
Avian plumage is ideal for investigating phenotypic convergence because of repeated evolution of the same within-feather patterns. In birds, there are three major types of regular patterns within feathers: sca...
Phenotypic plasticity operates across generations, when the parental environment affects phenotypic expression in the offspring. Recent studies in invertebrates have reported transgenerational plasticity in ph...
Socially cued anticipatory plasticity (SCAP) has been proposed as a widespread mechanism of adaptive life-history shifts in semelparous species with extreme male mating investment. Such mating systems evolved ...
Recurrence and predictability of evolution are thought to reflect the correspondence between genomic and phenotypic dimensions of organisms, and the connectivity in deterministic networks within these dimensio...
Fluorescent proteins are optically active proteins found across many clades in metazoans. A fluorescent protein was recently identified in a ctenophore, but this has been suggested to derive from a cnidarian, ...
Social learning is potentially advantageous, but evolutionary theory predicts that (i) its benefits may be self-limiting because social learning can lead to information parasitism, and (ii) these limitations c...
The development of multicellular organisms is coordinated by various gene regulatory mechanisms that ensure correct spatio-temporal patterns of gene expression. Recently, the role of antisense transcription in...
Transitions from marine to intertidal and terrestrial habitats resulted in a significant adaptive radiation within the Panpulmonata (Gastropoda: Heterobranchia). This clade comprises several groups that invade...
Predicting adaptive trajectories is a major goal of evolutionary biology and useful for practical applications. Systems biology has enabled the development of genome-scale metabolic models. However, analysing ...
A multiscale network of two galectins Galectin-1 (Gal-1) and Galectin-8 (Gal-8) patterns the avian limb skeleton. Among vertebrates with paired appendages, chondrichthyan fins typically have one or more cartil...
In most animal groups, it is unclear how body size variation relates to genital size differences between the sexes. While most morphological features tend to scale with total somatic size, this does not necess...
The infant cry is the most important communicative tool to elicit adaptive parental behaviour. Sex-specific adaptation, linked to parental investment, may have evolutionary shaped the responsiveness to changes...
Improved performance in a given ecological niche can occur through local adaptation, phenotypic plasticity, or a combination of these mechanisms. Evaluating the relative importance of these two mechanisms is n...
Living anguilliform eels represent a distinct clade of elongated teleostean fishes inhabiting a wide range of habitats. Locomotion of these fishes is highly influenced by the elongated body shape, the anatomy ...
Habitat selection may have profound evolutionary consequences, but they strongly depend on the underlying preference mechanism, including genetically-determined, natal habitat and phenotype-dependent preferenc...
Human influenza virus A/H3N2 undergoes rapid adaptive evolution in response to host immunity. Positively selected amino acid substitutions have been detected mainly in the hemagglutinin (HA) segment. The genea...
Pterygota insects typically have symmetric veins in left and right wings. For studying taxonomy and phylogeny of fossil insects, venational patterns are commonly used as diagnostic characters, in conjunction w...
Genotype networks are representations of genetic variation data that are complementary to phylogenetic trees. A genotype network is a graph whose nodes are genotypes (DNA sequences) with the same broadly defin...
The actual connectivity between populations of freshwater organisms is largely determined by species biology, but is also influenced by many area- and site-specific factors, such as water pollution and habitat...
Hadrosaurid dinosaurs, dominant Late Cretaceous herbivores, possessed complex dental batteries with up to 300 teeth in each jaw ramus. Despite extensive interest in the adaptive significance of the dental batt...
A central part of an animal's environment is its interactions with conspecifics. There has been growing interest in the potential to capture these interactions in the form of a social network. Such networks ca...
The extent of genetic structure of a species is determined by the amount of current gene flow and the impact of historical and demographic factors. Most marine invertebrates have planktonic larvae and conseque...
Climate oscillations in the Cenozoic reduced species richness and genetic diversity of terrestrial and aquatic animals and plants in central and northern Europe. The most abundant arthropods in temperate soils...
In the duplication-degeneration-complementation (DDC) model, a duplicated gene has three possible fates: it may lose functionality through the accumulation of mutations (nonfunctionalization), acquire a new fu...
A deeply rooted phylogenetic lineage of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) termed lineage 7 was discovered in Ethiopia. Whole genome sequencing of 30 lineage 7 strains from patients in Ethiopia was perf...
The evolution of primate sexual swellings and their influence on mating strategies have captivated the interest of biologists for over a century. Across the primate order, variability in the timing of ovulatio...
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