Latest Michael Alfaro Stories
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Basic logic would suggest that the longer a species is around—the more time it has to adapt and evolve, eventually sprouting another whole branch on the tree of life. However, that may not necessarily be the case according to a team of American biologists who just completed an evolutionary survey that accounted for around 1.2 million species. "When we look across the tree of life, the age of the group tells us almost nothing about...
Why are the faces of primates so dramatically different from one another? UCLA biologists working as "evolutionary detectives" studied the faces of 129 adult male primates from Central and South America, and they offer some answers in research published today, Jan. 11, in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The faces they studied evolved over at least 24 million years, they report. "If you look at New World primates, you're immediately struck by...
Biologists from the UCLA Division of Life Sciences have reported the first quantitative evidence for an evolutionary link between habitat and body size in turtles and tortoises. The study, whose lead author is a high school student volunteer in the laboratory of UCLA evolutionary biologist Michael Alfaro, is currently available online in Biology Letters, a journal of the Royal Society. It will appear in a print edition later this year. Turtles and tortoises, also called chelonians,...
Whales are remarkably diverse, with 84 living species of dramatically different sizes and more than 400 other species that have gone extinct, including some that lived partly on land. Why are there so many whale species, with so much diversity in body size?To answer that, UCLA evolutionary biologists and a colleague used molecular and computational techniques to look back 35 million years, when the ancestor of all living whales appeared, to analyze the evolutionary tempo of modern whale...
Mammals and many species of birds and fish are among evolution's "winners," while crocodiles, alligators and a reptile cousin of snakes known as the tuatara are among the losers, according to new research by UCLA scientists and colleagues."Our results indicate that mammals are special," said Michael Alfaro, a UCLA assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and lead author of the research.The study, published July 24 in the early online edition of Proceedings...
