Parallel adaptive radiations have arisen following the colonization of islands by lizards and lakes by fishes. In these classic examples, parallel adaptive radiation is a response to the ecological ...

There are now at least 13 species of finches on the Galapagos Islands, each filling a different niche on different islands. All of them evolved from one ancestral species, which colonized the islands ...

The performance of an organism in its environment frequently depends more on its composite phenotype than on individual phenotypic traits. Thus, understanding environmental adaptation requires ...

When Charles Darwin traveled to the Galapagos Islands almost 200 years ago as a gentleman naturalist, he used the power of observation to develop his theory that species evolve over time. When Charles ...

Challenging a 75-year-old notion about how and when reptiles evolved during the past 300 million-plus years involves a lot of camerawork, loads of CT scanning, and, most of all, thousands of miles of ...

Islands are hot spots of evolutionary adaptation that can also advantage species returning to the mainland, according to a new study. Islands are hot spots of evolutionary adaptation that can also ...

Part 1. The historical perspective -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The history of mammals [animals] -- 3. The early radiations -- 4. The Edentata -- 5. The Pholidota -- 6. Conclusions concerning the early ...

The evolutionary term that applies here is adaptive radiation. That’s when a single ancestor diversifies into a burst of new forms, each filling a niche, exploiting a resource, or responding to a ...