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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Evolution

Frequent shifts in pollination strategy are decoupled from diversification in the terrestrial orchids

Jamie B Thompson, Eric Robert Hagen, Elizabeth Anne Forward, et al.

Published: 2025-08-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

Pollinator attraction strategies are central to orchid reproductive biology and have long been hypothesised to accelerate speciation rates, particularly through specialised coevolutionary interactions. However, most macroevolutionary evidence comes from studies of individual genera or tribes, leaving broad-scale patterns unresolved. Here, we reconstruct the evolution of pollination strategy in [...]

Fast evolving flowers drive cactus diversification

Jamie B Thompson, Chris Venditti

Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

The rise of biodiversity is shaped by variation in diversification rates. Across the Tree of Life, numerous forces are thought to influence these rates, including the evolution of adaptive traits, climate change, and interactions with other organisms. In the flowering plants, a longstanding hypothesis favoured by Darwin suggests that floral evolution is a driving force for plant diversity. [...]

Changes in pollen production, pollen heteromorphism and ovule production with increased selfing in Viola arvensis

Samson Acoca-Pidolle, Perrine Gauthier, Pierre-Olivier Cheptou

Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Plant Biology, Population Biology

Predictive Evolutionary Genomics: Principles, Validation, and Practice

Daniel Ortiz-Barrientos, Maddie Ellen James, Liu Yang, et al.

Published: 2025-08-10
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Population Biology

Contemporary evolution occurs on observable timescales, enabling prospective evolutionary forecasting with quantitative frameworks rather than only retrospective inference. We propose a unified probabilistic framework that integrates three approaches linked to detectability windows through time. Trait-based models use multivariate quantitative-genetic equations to project correlated phenotypic [...]

Latitudinal genetic diversity gradients steepen toward the poles

Anne-Céline Granjon, Michael Gerth, Chloé Schmidt

Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Evolution, Genetics, Population Biology

Latitudinal biodiversity gradients are among the best-described biogeographic patterns. However, there is little agreement on whether genetic diversity, the most fundamental level of biodiversity, is also latitudinally distributed. The confusion about the distribution of genetic diversity at biogeographic scales stems in part from the fact that genetic diversity gradients have been described for [...]

Habitat availability, Jurassic and Cretaceous origins of the deep-bodied shark morphotype, and the rise of pelagic sharks

Joel Harrison Gayford, Patrick L Jambura, Julia Türtscher, et al.

Published: 2025-07-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

Macroevolutionary trends in morphology fundamentally shape our understanding of marine ecosystems through deep time. Sharks (Elasmobranchii: Selachii) have been suggested to broadly exhibit two discrete body forms: one ‘shallow-bodied’ form associated with slow-moving benthic species, and a ‘deep-bodied’ form typified by highly active pelagic taxa. Until now, the validity or evolution of these [...]

A systems-modelling approach to predict biological responses to extreme heat

Daniel W.A. Noble, Margie Mayfield, Ary A Hoffmann, et al.

Published: 2025-07-15
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Systems Biology

Anthropogenic climate change is leading to more frequent and extreme heat waves. These short-term but large-scale events are radically re-shaping interactions among organisms – impacting biodiversity, community composition and ecosystem services crucial to natural systems and food security. Predicting heat wave impacts on interacting species requires an understanding of the processes driving [...]

Allometry and shared ancestry, rather than ecology, shapes the evolution of 3D eye size in temperate butterflies

Sridhar Halali, Stephen A Hall, Lars B Pettersson, et al.

Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Sensory traits shape animal lifestyles due to the central role they play in retrieving and processing environmental information. However, being some of the most energetically expensive tissues to build and maintain, ecological demands often modulate investment in these organs. Evidence that ecology shapes the evolution of sensory traits is plenty but is heavily biased towards vertebrates and has [...]

Female driven reduction of sexual dimorphism in hominins

Thomas A Püschel, Jorge Avaria-Llautureo, Chris Venditti

Published: 2025-06-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

Sexual dimorphism is a key indicator of social structure and selective pressures in primate evolution, yet its evolutionary drivers in hominins remain contentious. Here, we combine cutting edge dimorphism estimation methods, with Bayesian phylogenetic comparative analyses to disentangle the sex-specific contributions and evolutionary dynamics underlying changes in body mass and canine size across [...]

From vocal homophily to vocal repertoire flexibility: Unravelling the socioecological drivers of language evolution

Sabine Stoll, Carel van Schaik, Judith M Burkart, et al.

Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Animal Studies, Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Evolution

Since diverging from the last common ancestor with bonobos and chimpanzees, the communication system of the hominin lineage underwent a radical transformation. Vocal production learning - the ability to produce novel vocalizations based on experience - is the necessary pre-condition for changing an ape-like communication system into one that is infinitely flexible, extensively learned, and [...]

Toxin resistance mechanisms span biological scales in the Royal Ground Snake (Colubridae: Erythrolamprus reginae)

Valeria Ramírez-Castañeda, Samantha Nixon, Dario Alarcón-Naforo, et al.

Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Molecular Biology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Physiology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Systems Biology, Zoology

Exposure to multiple toxic compounds imposes diverse selective pressures, potentially leading to a toxin-resistant phenotype that operates across biological levels. There are several known toxin resistance mechanisms–such as behavioral avoidance, metabolic detoxification, and target-site insensitivity. However, most studies have been conducted with exposure to a single toxin or have focused on [...]

Seabird range contraction and dispersal under climate change

Jorge Avaria-Llautureo, Marcelo M Rivadeneira, Chris Venditti, et al.

Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

Many marine ectotherms have historically adapted to local climate change by evolving smaller body sizes, reducing their energy demands in warmer waters but limiting their dispersal and speciation rate. Whether endothermic marine species respond similarly remains unclear, as temperature minimally affects their size diversity, and the drivers of their dispersal and speciation are poorly understood. [...]

Orphan and de novo Genes in Fungi and Animals: Identification, Origins and Functions

Ercan Seçkin, Dominique Colinet, Edoardo Sarti, et al.

Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences

Genes that don't have identifiable homologs in other species have been an intriguing and interesting topic of research for many years. These so-called orphan genes were first studied in yeast and since then, they have been found in many other species. This has fostered a whole field of research aiming at tracing back their evolutionary origin and functional significance. Orphan genes represent an [...]

Cellular Innovations and Diversity in the Lepidopteran Compound Eye

Wei Lu, Marcus R. Kronforst

Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics

Lepidoptera, having co-diversified with flowering plants and adapted to various diel niches, present a remarkable system for studying compound eye cell type diversity. Here we synthesize the latest research regarding lepidopteran eye evolution across different timescales, from species-level variation to family-level changes, and mechanistic levels, from broad anatomical variation to molecular [...]

IQ2MC: A New Framework to Infer Phylogenetic Time Trees Using IQ-TREE 3 and MCMCTree with Mixture Models

Piyumal Demotte, Muthukumaran Panchaksaram, Hashara Kumarasinghe, et al.

Published: 2025-05-05
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences

IQ-TREE and MCMCTree are two widely used phylogenetic tools to infer phylogenetic trees and estimate divergence times, respectively. As MCMCTree performs fast approximate Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling to obtain the times along a fixed tree topology, it would be natural to use IQ-TREE to obtain the tree. However, it is currently not possible to integrate these tools seamlessly, as MCMCTree [...]

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