Another step sorting out the evolutionary history of humans and other great apes, reported in Nature. For the study, 79 wild- and captive-born individuals representing all six great ape species and seven subspecies were sequenced. The results don’t seem particularly surprising We find extensive inbreeding in almost all wild populations, with eastern gorillas being the…
is probably *TATA* – the lungfish. OK, I spoiled the surprise, but if you have any interest in evolution, you should still read this excellent paper on the evolution of the first tetrapods in tomorrow’s issue of Nature. It’s just amazing what the molecular biology colleagues are pulling out of full genome sequencing data in…
In a new paper that will appear in Nature tomorrow, Walter Jetz and Colleagues “present, analyse and map the first complete dated phylogeny of all 9,993 extant species of birds, a widely studied group showing many unique adaptations.” The emphasis here is on the word “dated” – the study provides estimated diversification rates across the…
I said this before: it’s fascinating to see phylogenetic and phylogeographic methods being applied to linguistic and anthropological studies. A new example of that is a paper in Science, “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family” led by Remco Bouckaert that came out today. They use BEAST with basic vocabulary data from…
I was blogging recently about a study on the evolution of the Gorilla and its ancestral relationship to the other great apes. Now, the circle on the sequencing of the great apes closes with a new study published today in Nature, which presents a genome-wide sequence of the Bonobo, contrasted with the chimpanzee and the…
Two papers that just appeared in press at Ecography caught my attention, a review about methods to deal with collinearity lead by Carsten Dormann (looks like the sequel to his autocorrelation paper in the same journal), and a “horizon scan” for macroecology by Jan Beck and colleagues. I guess the issue of collinearity is pretty…
It seems the time is there for coupling genetics, ecology and evolution, at least Nature is pulling out one interesting paper after the other in that area (see also the recent posts 1,2). One of the latest outcomes is an impressive study by a large group of authors around Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin, who…
I want to highlight two interesting papers coming out last week in the field of phylogenetics and evolution. The first is a paper by Nagalingum et al. who use fossil-calibrated molecular phylogenies to examine the diversification of cycads, and ancient lineage of woody plants. The cycad record dates back at least to the early Permian…
It’s already a few months old, but still worth mentioning – I really liked the paper “Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific” by Thomas E. Currie and colleagues in Nature. The authors construct a phylogenetic tree based on the vocabulary of 84 Austronesian societies, and used these measures…
theoretical ecology 