Evolution articles within Nature

Featured

  • Letter |

    The Red Queen hypothesis predicts that coevolution should increase the rate of evolution at the molecular level. Here, genome sequencing in an experimental phage–bacteria system is used to show that this is true, but the effect is concentrated on specific loci, and also that coevolution drives greater diversification of phage populations.

    • Steve Paterson
    • , Tom Vogwill
    •  & Michael A. Brockhurst

  • Letter |

    Evolution from one fitness peak to another must involve either transitions through intermediates of low fitness or skirting round the fitness valley through compensatory mutations elsewhere. Here, the base pairs in mitochondrial tRNA stems is used as a model to show that deep fitness valleys can be traversed. Transitions between AU and GC pairs have occurred during mammalian evolution without help from genetic drift or mutations elsewhere.

    • Margarita V. Meer
    • , Alexey S. Kondrashov
    •  & Fyodor A. Kondrashov

  • News in Brief |

    What really killed Tutankhamun?

    • Declan Butler

  • News & Views |

    Big and beautiful microfossils have been extracted from rocks that are more than 3 billion years old. They offer tantalizing hints about the antiquity of the eukaryote lineage of organisms that includes ourselves.

    • Roger Buick

  • News Feature |

    Experiments have revealed how single mutations can have huge effects that drive evolution. But small steps pave the way, finds Tanguy Chouard.

    • Tanguy Chouard

  • Article |

    Local adaptations are often governed by several interacting genes scattered throughout the genome. Here a novel type of multi–locus genetic variation is described that has been maintained within a species over a vast period of time. A balanced unlinked gene network polymorphism is dissected that involves galactose utilization in a close relative of baker's yeast.

    • Chris Todd Hittinger
    • , Paula Gonçalves
    •  & Antonis Rokas

  • News |

    Experts question claims that malaria and osteonecrosis contributed to Pharaoh's decline.

    • Declan Butler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The first genome sequence of an ancient human is reported. It comes from an approximately 4,000-year-old permafrost-preserved hair from a male from the first known culture to settle in Greenland. Functional single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) assessment is used to assign possible phenotypic characteristics and high-confidence SNPs are compared to those of contemporary populations to find those most closely related to the individual.

    • Morten Rasmussen
    • , Yingrui Li
    •  & Eske Willerslev

  • News & Views |

    Experiments with simple chordate animals show how decay may make the resulting fossils seem less evolved. The consequence is to distort evidence of the evolution of the earliest vertebrates and their precursors.

    • Derek E. G. Briggs

  • Letter |

    The evolutionary interrelationships of arthropods has long been a matter of dispute. A new phylogeny applies an arsenal of techniques to more than 41,000 base pairs of DNA from 75 arthropod species. The results support the idea that insects are land–living crustaceans, that crustaceans comprise a diverse assemblage of at last three distinct arthropod types, and that myriapods (millipedes and centipedes) comprise the closest relatives of this great 'pancrustacean' group.

    • Jerome C. Regier
    • , Jeffrey W. Shultz
    •  & Clifford W. Cunningham

  • News & Views |

    How, when and from where did Madagascar's unique mammalian fauna originate? The idea that the ancestors of that fauna rafted from Africa finds support in innovative simulations of ancient ocean currents.

    • David W. Krause

  • Letter |

    Our only direct information on the origin of vertebrates comes from preserved soft-bodied Cambrian chordates; however, reading this fossil record is fraught with difficulties owing to a lack of data on when and how important characters change as they decompose. Here, from experimental decay of amphioxus and ammocoetes, it is shown that loss of chordate characters during decay is non-random, with the features that are most phylogenetically informative tending to decay first.

    • Robert S. Sansom
    • , Sarah E. Gabbott
    •  & Mark A. Purnell

  • Letter |

    Recent work suggests that microRNAs might have been important in the evolution of complexity in multicellular animals. Here it is shown that the most ancient known microRNA, miR–100, was initially active in neurosecretory cells around the mouth. Other highly conserved varieties were first present in specific tissues and organ systems. Thus, microRNA expression was initially restricted to an ancient set of ancient animal cell types and tissues.

    • Foteini Christodoulou
    • , Florian Raible
    •  & Detlev Arendt

  • Letter |

    Here the presence of melanosomes — characteristic bodies that give feathers their colour — is demonstrated in feathers and feather-like structures of fossil early birds and dinosaurs from the Early Cretaceous Jehol Group of China. Not only is it shown that the feather–like structures of dinosaurs such as Sinosauropteryx really are akin to feathers, it is also possible to speculate in an informed way about their colour.

    • Fucheng Zhang
    • , Stuart L. Kearns
    •  & Xiaolin Wang

  • Letter |

    If robustness is the opposite of evolvability, we might expect that a robust population would have difficulty adapting to environmental change; however, some studies have suggested that genetic robustness facilitates adaptation. Here, using a general population genetics model, mutational robustness is found to either impede or facilitate adaptation depending on the population size, the mutation rate and the structure of the fitness landscape.

    • Jeremy A. Draghi
    • , Todd L. Parsons
    •  & Joshua B. Plotkin

  • News & Views |

    Biologists have assumed that natural selection shapes larger patterns of evolution through interactions such as competition and predation. These patterns may instead be determined by rare, stochastic speciation.

    • Michael J. Benton

  • News & Views |

    The giant-panda genome is the first reported de novo assembly of a large mammalian genome achieved using next-generation sequencing methods. The feat reflects a trend towards ever-decreasing genome-sequencing costs.

    • Kim C. Worley
    •  & Richard A. Gibbs

  • Letter |

    Little is known about the recent evolution of the Y chromosome because only the human Y chromosome has been fully sequenced. The sequencing of the male-specific region of the Y chromosome (MSY) in the chimpanzee and comparison between the MSYs of the two species now reveals that they differ radically in sequence structure and gene content, indicating rapid evolution over the past 6 million years.

    • Jennifer F. Hughes
    • , Helen Skaletsky
    •  & David C. Page

  • News |

    Much more carbon is sequestered by echinoderms than previously thought.

    • Matt Kaplan

  • Article |

    The earliest body fossils of tetrapods (vertebrates with limbs rather than paired fins) date to the Late Devonian period. There have been claims of tetrapod trackways predating these body fossils but the age and identity of the track makers have remained controversial. The discovery of well-preserved and securely dated tetrapod tracks from Polish marine tidal flat sediments of early Middle Devonian age, around 18 million years older than the earliest tetrapod body fossils, is now presented.

    • Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki
    • , Piotr Szrek
    •  & Per E. Ahlberg

  • News & Views |

    The tracks left by organisms are among the most difficult of fossils to interpret. But just such evidence puts debate about the origins of four-limbed vertebrates (which include ourselves) on a changed footing.

    • Philippe Janvier
    •  & Gaël Clément

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