The real Paleo Diet: tracing 800 million years of evolution in animal diets

In our new author blog, Professor John Wiens describes the first ever study of the evolution of diet across all animals. One of the most fundamental aspects of the biology of an animal species is the type of food that it eats.  Animals have a remarkable diversity of diets and of lifestyles that are associated …

Fishes famed for being bony have soft spot

Eli G. Cytrynbaum, Clayton M. Small, and Charles B. Kimmel, authors of a new study in Evolution Letters, explain how their discovery of the "extended osteoid" – a nonmineralised bone matrix – influences our understanding of morphological evolution in bony fish. Sculpins are benthic fish in the superfamily Cottoidea famed for their boniness. Often a bane …