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The teeth of Mesozoic marine reptiles are used to establish a dietary guild system for the species of the Jurassic Sub-Boreal Seaway over about 18 million years, revealing that niche partition and spatial distribution that varied following sea depth enabled species coexistence, as with marine faunas today.
Sexually selected traits primarily drive reproductive success, but their secondary functions are less well studied. Here, the authors show that antler retention among male elk involves a trade-off between predator deterrence and reproductive success in the next breeding season.
Long-term replication experiments using two RNA molecules that must cooperate to replicate reveals a concentration range within which cooperation is maintained even in the presence of a parasitic RNA.
Analysing data from 39 grassland biodiversity experiments, the authors uncover the direct and indirect contributions to ecosystem stability of taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional trait diversity.
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.
Whole genome data for 221 geo-referenced cultivated and wild accessions of pearl millet reveals their domestication centre in the western Sahara, 4,900 years ago.
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.
More diverse plant communities show increasing productivity through time. Here, the authors show that evolutionary selection for facilitative interactions occurs only in mixtures, whereas selection for reduced competition occurs in both monocultures and mixtures.