Denisovans, a group of now extinct humans who lived in Eastern Eurasia in the Middle and
Late Pleistocene, were first identified from DNA sequences just over a decade ago. Only ten …

Theories of how species evolve in changing environments mostly consider single species in
isolation or pairs of interacting species. Yet all organisms live in diverse communities …

Birds have been comprehensively assessed on the International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN) Red List more times than any other taxonomic group. However, to date …

Since the late Pleistocene, large-bodied mammals have been extirpated from much of Earth.
Although all habitable continents once harbored giant mammals, the few remaining species …

A fundamental goal in evolutionary biology is to understand the genetic architecture of
adaptive traits. Using whole-genome data of 3955 of Darwin's finches on the Galápagos …

Large-scale adaptive radiations might explain the runaway success of a minority of extant
vertebrate clades. This hypothesis predicts, among other things, rapid rates of morphological …

A major constraint on the evolution of large body sizes in animals is an increased risk of
develo** cancer. There is no correlation, however, between body size and cancer risk …

Facial length is one of the best known examples of heterochrony. Changes in the timing of
facial growth have been invoked as a mechanism for the origin of our short human face from …

The mid-Pliocene was a global warm period, preceding the onset of Quaternary glaciations.
Here we use cosmogenic nuclide dating to show that a fossiliferous terrestrial deposit that …

Aim We assessed the generality of the island rule in a database comprising 1593
populations of insular mammals (439 species, including 63 species of fossil mammals), and …