Biodiversity is the key to successful reforestation and climate-change mitigation because each tree species has its own way of getting the nutrients it needs to survive.
Perhaps old species, like some older people, gradually lose their ability to deal with changes in their environment. Aaron O’Dea and colleagues show that when the Caribbean was cut off from the Pacific by the rise of the Panama land bridge, evolutionarily old species took longer to expand into new habitats than evolutionarily younger species did.
Join us to celebrate a few of the discoveries made in 2018.
Long-distance migrations are common for large whales, but when in their evolutionary past did they begin to migrate and why? Fossil whale barnacles may have the answers
By taking on characteristics from another, younger stage in its life-cycle, this fossil crab was probably able to adapt to new conditions.
By diving into the past lives of coral reefs, a historical ecologist may protect our present-day reefs from human impacts
Fever may be less effective at repelling infections in cold-blooded creatures
The Panamanian scientist Carlos De Gracia discovered the largest known marlin fossil, helped improve the classification of these ancient species and now seeks to understand how the fish of millions of years ago reacted to changes in the ocean similar to those we are experiencing today
Giving rise to the richest alpine flora in the world, interconnections between islands of Andean paramo vegetation flicker off and on as global temperatures rise and fall during the last million years
Analyzing the fossil vegetation from millions of years ago, Mónica Carvalho seeks to understand the environmental conditions that led to the evolution of Neotropical forests as we know them today.
