Charles Darwin's travels on HMS Beagle taught him that islands are an important source of
evidence for evolution. Because many islands are young and have relatively few species …

Studies on domestication are blooming, but the developmental bases for the generation of
domestication traits and breed diversity remain largely unexplored. Some phenotypic …

Aims The 50th anniversary of the publication of the seminal book, The Theory of Island
Biogeography, by Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson, is a timely moment to review …

Island faunas can be characterized by gigantism in small animals and dwarfism in large
animals, but the extent to which this so-called 'island rule'provides a general explanation for …

Islands have long been recognized as distinctive evolutionary arenas leading to
morphologically divergent species, such as dwarfs and giants. We assessed how body size …

The tendency of mammals to increase or decrease body size with respect to geography or
time depends on the abundance, availability, and size of resources. This dependency …

Species richness is commonly thought to increase with habitat diversity. However, a recent
theoretical model aiming to unify niche and island biogeography theories predicted a hump …

Birds are prolific colonists of islands, where they readily evolve distinct forms. Identifying
predictable, directional patterns of evolutionary change in island birds, however, has proved …

The Late Cretaceous was a time of tremendous global change, as the final stages of the Age
of Dinosaurs were shaped by climate and sea level fluctuations and witness to marked …

Despite the great interest it generates, the definition of Bergmann's Rule is vague and often
contested. Debate focuses on whether the rule should be described in terms of pattern or …