Taxon sampling is a central aspect of phylogenetic study design, but it has received limited attention in the context of total-evidence dating, a widely used dating approach that directly integrates molecular and morphological information from extant and fossil taxa. We here assess the impact of commonly employed outgroup sampling schemes and missing morphological data in extant taxa on age estimates in a total-evidence dating analysis under the uniform tree prior. Our study group is Pimpliformes,...

Early life conditions may have long-lasting effects on life history. In color polymorphic species, morph-specific sensitivity to environmental conditions may lead to differential fitness. In tawny owl (Strix aluco) pheomelanin-based color polymorphism is expected to be maintained because the brown morph has higher adult fitness in warmer environments, while selection favors the grey morph under colder conditions. Here we investigate body mass at fledging and its consequences until adulthood in a population at the species’...

The dataset consists of a PDF file and two plain-text TNT scripts (*.run files). The PDF includes supporting Figures for the additional analyses conducted by Flores et al. on paleontological datasets. The TNT scripts conduct two complementary sets of analyses: (a) evaluation of taxon instability relative to the incompleteness ("mc.run"), and (b) changes in branch support values after pruning unstable taxa ("avmc.run"). To properly run these files in TNT, the name of the matrix files...

1. To understand the diversity and strength of predation in natural communities, researchers must quantify the total amount of prey species in the diet of predators. Metabarcoding approaches have allowed widespread characterization of predator diets with high taxonomic resolution. To determine the wider impacts of predators, researchers should combine DNA techniques with estimates of population size of predators using mark-release-recapture (MRR) methods, and with accurate metrics of food consumption by individuals. 2. Herein, we estimate...

Gene transcription variation is known to contribute to disease susceptibility and adaptation, but we currently know very little about how contemporary natural selection shapes transcript abundance. Here, we propose a novel analytical framework to quantify the strength and form of ongoing natural selection at the transcriptome level in a wild vertebrate. We estimated selection on transcript abundance in a cohort of a wild salmonid fish (Salmo trutta) affected by an extracellular myxozoan parasite (Tetracapsuloides bryosalmonae)...

Amazonian rivers have been proposed to act as geographic barriers to species dispersal, either driving allopatric speciation or defining current distribution limits. The strength of the barrier varies according to the species ecological characteristics and the river physical properties. Environmental heterogeneity may also drive compositional changes, but have hardly been assessed in Amazonia. Aiming to understand the contributions of riverine barriers and environmental heterogeneity in shaping compositional changes in Amazonian forest bird assemblages, we focus...

1. The latitudinal herbivory hypothesis (LHH) predicts that plant losses to herbivores decrease from low to high latitudes. Although the LHH is a community-level hypothesis, it has been rarely tested with data on community-wide herbivory, i.e. the percentage of annual production of foliar biomass consumed by insects from all plant species at a given site. Therefore, we asked whether community-wide leaf herbivory follows the same latitudinal pattern as observed for an unweighted average of herbivory...

Birds, among various other taxa, construct nests. Nests form an extended phenotype of the individual building it. Nests are used to extend control over the conditions in which offspring develop, and are therefore commonly considered to be shaped by selection. Nevertheless, scarcely any scientific evidence exist that nest composition is under selection. Here, we demonstrate with data from over 400 blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) nests collected over eight years that a higher proportion of feathers...