Latest Species Stories

A recent study by an international group of evolutionary biologists has pointed to six broad yet distinct ‘waves’ of climate-induced mammalian diversity in the last 65 million years of evolution. Researchers say that extended periods of warming and cooling appear to signal the shift from one dominant grouping of mammals to the next. In the online version of the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Professor Christine Janis of Brown University and a...

In a major effort to speed up the process of officially recognizing new plant species, botanists will no longer be required to provide Latin descriptions of new species, and publication in online academic journals and books will be considered as valid as print publication. The new rules, which were approved at a nomenclature conference held in conjunction with the International Botanical Congress in July, become effective January 1, 2012. They overturn longstanding historical requirements...

Believed critical for determining which individuals can -- or cannot -- successfully reproduce with each other, genitalia not only figure prominently in the origin of new species, but are also typically the first type of trait to change as new species form. Today, new international research led by Indiana University shows that as populations and species diversify, the exact shape and fit of genitalia steals the show over size. In data gathered from populations isolated for less than 50...

New findings by Virginie Stevens (CNRS), Jean Clobert (CNRS), Michel Baguette (Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle) and colleagues show that interactions between dispersal and life-histories are complex, but general patterns emerge. The study was published as open access paper in the journal Ecology Letters. As dispersal plays a key role in gene flow among populations, its evolutionary dynamics under environmental changes is particularly important. The inter-dependency of dispersal with...

A study of South American songbirds completed by the Department of Biology at Queen’s University and the Argentine Museum of Natural History, has discovered these birds differ dramatically in colour and song yet show very little genetic differences which indicates they are on the road to becoming a new species. “One of Darwin’s accomplishments was to show that species could change, that they were not the unaltered, immutable products of creation,” says Leonardo Campagna, a Ph.-D...

Evolutionary change helps species track ongoing climate warming As global temperatures rise and climatic zones move polewards, species will need to find different environments to prevent extinction. New research, published today in the journal Molecular Ecology, has revealed that climate change is causing certain species to move and adapt to a range of new habitats. The study, led by academics at the Universities of Bristol and Sheffield, aimed to understand the role of evolution in...

The US Food and Drug Administration (USDA) recently officially approved DNA barcoding for seafood in hopes of preventing the growing issue of the mislabeling, both locally produced and imported, into the United States, Rod McGuirk of the Associated Press (AP) reports. Regulators from other countries are also considering adopting DNA barcoding as a cost-effective and highly reliable tool for identifying organic matter. The barcoding of DNA is essentially a standardized fingerprint that can...

'This study conducted during the International Year of the Bat offers a clear example of how the evolution of new traits, in this case a skull with a new shape, allowed animals to use new resources and eventually, to rapidly evolve into many new species' A new study involving bat skulls, bite force measurements and scat samples collected by an international team of evolutionary biologists is helping to solve a nagging question of evolution: Why some groups of animals develop scores of...

Max Planck researchers simulate the conditions for the safest possible release of genetically modified organisms Genetically modified animals are designed to contain the spread of pathogens. One prerequisite for the release of such organisms into the environment is that the new gene variant does not spread uncontrollably, suppressing natural populations. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, have now established that certain mutations are...

There are few universal rules in ecology, but arguably one is the relationship between the area of a study plot and the number of species counted within that plot, the so called species-area relationship. Larger study plots obviously host on average more species than do smaller plots, and ecologists have long sought a universal description of this relationship. Recently, it has been suggested that a universal species-area relationship can be calculated using Maximum Entropy methods once we...