Brontotheres, or “thunder beasts” – an extinct lineage of herbivorous rhinoceros-like mammals (though more closely related to horses) – evolved their massive multi-ton body sizes as a way to survive ...

Advances in the generation, retrieval, and analysis of phylogenetic data have enabled researchers to create phylogenies that contain many thousands of taxa. These "macrophylogenies"—large trees that ...

The pterosaurs, Mesozoic flying reptiles, attained wingspans of more than 10 m that greatly exceed the largest birds and challenge our understanding of size limits in flying animals. Pterosaurs have ...

This is a preview. Log in through your library . Abstract The evolution of quantitative characters over long timescales is often studied using stochastic diffusion models. The current toolbox ...

Regions with high diversity or many unique species are often assumed to be hotbeds of species origination, but a new theory demonstrates that such places could instead result from the immigration of ...

image: These specimens were collected and labelled on the second voyage of the HMS Beagle (1831 -1836) that carried Darwin to the Galapagos Islands. Researchers say these famously diverse finches are ...

The fossil record contains numerous examples of dramatic evolutionary change in animals through time. Exactly how genetic alterations brought about these macroevolutionary changes, however, has proved ...