Gene flow in giraffes and what it means for their conservation

Giraffes are a beautiful and powerful example of what adaptive evolution can achieve. However, in recent years, they have attained notoriety for a completely different reason: it has been suggested that instead of one giraffe ...

Tale of terroir: Porcini mushrooms evolved to local environment

The Dentinger Lab at the Natural History Museum of Utah has published a provocative new paper in the journal New Phytologist that describes their work with the much beloved mushroom, Boletus edulis, better known by gastronomers ...

Wax flowers and their complex relationship

The wax flowers, which originated in the Oligocene, form the plant genus Hoya, named after the English gardener Thomas Hoy. This genus—as well as the related genera—belongs to the genus group (tribus) of the Marsdenieae, ...

Lungfish fins reveal how limbs evolved

The evolution of limbs with functional digits from fish fins happened approximately 400 million years ago in the Devonian. This morphological transition allowed vertebrates to leave the water to conquer land and gave rise ...

Tackling coral reefs' thorny problem

Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have revealed the evolutionary history of the crown-of-thorns starfish—a predator of coral that can devastate coral reefs. Their ...

Alpine ginger Roscoea tibetica comprises two species

The alpine ginger Roscoea tibetica Batalin is the most widespread and extensively phenotypic-variable herbaceous species in Roscoea in the Hengduan Mountains. Diverse phenotypic variations in one population and similar habitat ...

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