Toll receptors play an important role in the innate immunity of invertebrates. All reported Tolls have only one Toll/interleukin-1 receptor (TIR) domain at the C-terminal. In this study, numerous Tolls with tandem TIRs at ...

Animal societies are typically divided into those in which reproduction within a group is monopolized by a single female versus those in which it is shared among multiple females. It remains controversial, however, whether ...

Throughout an organism’s early development, variations in physiology and behaviours may have long lasting consequences on individual life histories. While a large part of variation in critical life-history transitions ...

A comparison of Upper Palaeolithic and contemporary salmonid vertebrae from the Iberian Peninsula indicates that there has been a significant decrease in the mean body size for a given age among Atlantic salmon and brown ...

Tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPs) help regulate the extracellular matrix (ECM) in animals, mostly by inhibiting matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs). They are important activators of mutable collagenous tissue ...

Land-use intensity (LUI) is assumed to impact the genetic structure of organisms. While effects of landscape structure on the genetics of local populations have frequently been analysed, potential effects of variation in ...

In ichnology, the Goldilocks effect describes a scenario in which a substrate must be ‘just right’ in order for tracks to form—too soft, the animal will be unable to traverse the area, and too firm, the substrate will not ...

Biological invasions offer unique opportunities to investigate evolutionary dynamics at the peripheries of expanding pop-ulations. Here, we examine genetic patterns associated with admixture between two distinct invasive ...

The eggs of amniotes exhibit a remarkable variety of shapes, from spherical to elongate and from symmetrical to asymmetrical. We examine eggshell geometry in a diverse sample of fossil and living amniotes using geometric ...

Evolution is presumed to proceed by random mutations, which increase an individual’s fitness. Increased fitness produces a higher survival rate for those individuals within populations and drives the variants to fixation ...