An international team of scientists has built the largest and most detailed bird family tree to date—an intricate chart delineating 93 million years of evolutionary relationships between 363 bird species, representing 92% ...
When scientists and policymakers make tough calls on which areas to prioritize for conservation, biodiversity is often their top consideration. Environments with more diversity support a greater number of species and provide ...
In the quest to decipher the evolutionary relationships of extinct organisms from fossils, researchers often face challenges in discerning key features from weathered fossils, or with prioritizing characteristics of organisms ...
As a major driving force of evolution, polyploidy (genome duplication) is ubiquitous across different evolutionary stages of the flowering plant tree of life. However, the interactions between the ancestral genomes in a polyploid ...
Extracytoplasmic function sigma factors (ECFs) have been successfully used for constructing predictable artificial gene circuits in bacteria like Escherichia coli, but their transferability between species within the same ...
Despite the importance of biodiversity and the urgency to conserve it, assessing what aspect of biodiversity requires the highest priority has proven complex, especially when conservation resources are limited. A new study ...
Anemonefish form mutualistic relationships with the sea anemones they live in and these associations are not random: some species such as the yellow-tail anemonefish (Amphiprion clarkii) are generalists and can live in almost ...
For years, controversy has swirled around how a Cretaceous-era, sail-backed dinosaur—the giant Spinosaurus aegyptiacus—hunted its prey. Spinosaurus was among the largest predators ever to prowl the Earth and one of the ...
Whales and dolphins get their nutrients and essential elements through their diet. While eating fish, squid, octopus, crustaceans, and other marine mammals, they are also exposed to heavy metal contaminants.
A new study published in the journal PLOS ONE explores the weight great fossil sites have on our understanding of evolutionary relationships between fossil groups—the lagerstätten effect—and for the first time, has quantified ...
