Examples of Evolution

Dinosaurs of a Feather. Archaeopteryx, found in 1861, was long thought to be the first bird.
Then
it was recognized as something closer to a dinosaur with feathers but still unique for that. In the 1980s, however, paleontologists digging in deposits more than 65 million years old in northern China foundfeathered dinosaurs which very definitely did not fly. Some dinosaurs, it appeared, may have looked far different from our traditional conception and feathers may first have served an insulating or aesthetic, rather than aerodynamic, purpose.
Image: Zhao Chuang & Xing Lida / Nature
A Toothy Finding. In 2007, University of Helsinki evolutionary biologist Kathryn Kavanagh showed that
molars emerge from front to back, with each tooth smaller than its precedent. Fodder for geeked-out dentists? Far from it: Her model predicted tooth development of rodents with different diets a perfect confluence of a small mechanical observation and observed evolutionary trajectories.
Image: Kathryn Kavanagh / Nature
The Beginnings of Bones. Neural crest cells originate in the spinal cord before diffusing through our
developing bodies, forming face and neck bones as well as sense organs and skin. The fossil record, nearly bereft of embryos, provides little direct insight into these critically important stages. But technologies that let researchers track cells during embryo development finally allowed them to watch the neural crests development, culminating in the attachment of head to the body at its front, while the back attachment springs from the mesoderm tissue layer. With that established, scientists can decipher shared evolutionary histories from muscle attachments: the cleithrum, for example, a bony girdle found in fishes, lives on in humans as the shoulder blade.
Natural Selection in Speciation. That differing selection pressures will cleave one species into two
is a simple principle expressed in complex ways. One of these is reproductive isolation when, for example, one species of stickleback fish live in freshwater streams, and the other goes to sea. Scientists found that stream-bound sticklebacks prefer larger mates, and genetic analysis confirmed that theirpopulations are indeed diverging.
Lizard Games. Take an island in the Bahamas, add a predatory lizard called Leiocephalus carinatus, and the results are immediate. Males among the lizards favorite prey, Anolis sagrei, soon became longer-legged, so as to better flee after drawing predatory attention
during mating displays. In contrast, more sedentary females became larger, making them harder to ingest a neat display of sex-specific selection pressures.
An Evolutionary Arms Race, Frozen in Time. Predator and prey evolve together; the adaptations
of one driving adaptations in the other. But how can one study this over time, in detail? Biologists from Belgiums Catholic University of Leuven used water fleas and parasitic mites that had been preserved in the mud of a lakes bottom. The sediments were precisely dated and their inhabitants revived, allowing researchers to mix species from different eras and directly measure their developing capacity for infection and escape.
Gene Flow, With Purpose. If dispersed by random animal migration, genes flowing across a region
ought to dilute local pockets of genetic adaptation. But migration isnt as random as it seems: As seen in a population of great tits (the bird!) tracked in Oxfordshire, England since 1970, genes flow along channels of opportunity. Individual birds picking nesting spots bestsuited to their particular traits, producing local adaptations in tiny parts of the same small forest. (These birds, incidentally, belonged to the same population that have shifted breeding times to match a changing climate.)
Selection Finds Its Own Level. Since natural selection favors traits that increase fitness, it seems
that populations should eventually become genetically homogeneous. But evolution isnt so onedimensional: When researchers adjusted the color frequencies of wild guppy populations in Trinidad, they found that unusual variants regardless of color had higher survival rates. This is called frequencydependent survival: selection favoring the rare and disfavoring the common, preventing a long-term homogeneity that no matter how beneficial in the short term might someday prove disastrous. Making Do. Though so often elegant, evolution can also be jury-rigged and provisional. Witness the Moray eel, whose body is so long and narrow that unlike other fish the suction created when it opens its mouth is too weak to catch prey. The solution: a second set of jaws and teeth that sprout from the skeleton around its gills. Its not pretty, but it works.

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Dinosaurs of a Feather. Archaeopteryx, found in 1861, was long thought to be the first bird.

Image: Zhao Chuang & Xing Lida / Nature

Image: Kathryn Kavanagh / Nature

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