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Palaeogenomic data from four Late Pleistocene cave bears reveals that cave bears admixed with brown bears in the Pleistocene epoch, and despite cave bears going extinct during the Last Glacial Maximum, extant brown bears maintain a genomic contribution from cave bears.
Using a model derived from metabolic theory, the authors identify the contributions of soil biota metabolism, community composition and heterotrophic activity to soil respiration. The approach accurately predicts variation in respiration with mean annual temperature (MAT) across five biomes.
Data from 2 million individual trees spanning 1,781 species reveal that tropical forests can be grouped into four size-dependent life-history survival modes, the application of which in demographic simulations predicts biomass change.
A new species of Late Triassic pterosaur, Caelestiventus hanseni, predates all other known desert pterosaurs by 65 million years, showing that from an early point in their evolution, pterosaurs were widely geographically distributed and capable of dwelling in harsh environments.
Analysing >20,000 specimens from >4,500 species, the authors reveal an exceptional pattern of brain–body allometry among birds and mammals, consistent with the hypothesis that they have relaxed allometric constraints compared to other jawed vertebrates.
Low-frequency vegetation optical depth (L-VOD) sensing reveals global patterns of seasonal variations in ecosystem-scale plant water storage and relationships with leaf phenology; results vary between tropical and temperate–boreal zones.
Analysing the structure of both plant–pollinator and host–parasitoid networks in calcareous grasslands, the authors reveal scale-dependent responses to habitat fragmentation in the structure and stability of different network types.
A study of foot-and-mouth disease in Tanzanian livestock and buffalo populations identifies waves spreading through cattle herds across the region, and economic impacts to rural communities that could be alleviated by targeted vaccination.
Long-term selective breeding has produced strains of the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) with different behaviours. Here, the authors sequence the genomes of tame and aggressive strains to uncover the genetic regions that have responded to selection for behaviour.
Combining parallel genome-wide association studies from both host plant (Arabidopsis thaliana) and insect herbivore (Pieris rapae) perspectives, plus a comparative analysis across diverse butterfly/plant systems, the authors identify core genes involved in herbivory.
The nature of aspidin, the most primitive bone-like tissue, is controversial. Here, the authors show that aspidin is acellular dermal bone, suggesting that early vertebrates possessed a full repertoire of skeletal tissue types.
Outlining a framework based on a generalized plant–soil feedback model, the authors show that negative frequency-dependent feedback is necessary for the persistence of whole plant communities, and establish a quantitative metric for the strength of feedback needed for coexistence.
Reconstructing bacterial diversity dynamics from phylogenies, the authors estimate that there are about 1.4–1.9 million extant bacterial lineages and that diversity has been continuously increasing over the past 1 billion years, although most lineages to have inhabited Earth are now extinct.
Sex-discordant selection causes intralocus sexual conflict as different alleles are favoured in each sex. Here, the authors show that the evolution of body size dimorphism—a trait with strong correlation between males and females—is arrested in Drosophila for many generations due to intralocus sexual conflict.
A population-genomic analysis of more than 800 isolates of Staphylococcus aureus, representing the breadth of host-species diversity, reveals details of the pathogen’s evolutionary trajectory, including how this has been influenced by animal domestication and antibiotic use.
Palaeoenvironmental analysis reveals the ecological history of the Andean–Amazonian corridor, where European colonization resulted in depopulation, land-use decline and forest succession such that by the nineteenth century the region came to be seen as a pristine natural environment.
Analysing a database of >1,800 field studies in the terrestrial Arctic, the authors identify large spatial biases in sampling, with nearly one-third of all citations derived from sites located within 50 km of two research stations.
Logarithmic scales are frequently used in ecological data display, but the degree to which they are understood is not clear. Here, the authors survey members of the Ecological Society of America and find that only 56% of respondents correctly interpreted data presented on log–log axes.
A new sauropodomorph dinosaur taxon, Ingentia prima, and new lessemsaurid fossils from the Late Triassic of Argentina, reveal a distinctive and early pathway towards gigantism, 30 million years before the first eusauropods appeared.