Insects have evolved diverse methods of camouflage that have played an important role in their evolutionary success. Debris-carrying, a behavior of actively harvesting and carrying exogenous materials, is among the most fascinating and complex behaviors because it requires not only an ability to recognize, collect, and carry materials but also evolutionary adaptations in related morphological c...

W hy does California, a large and topographically complex state that spans fogdrenched redwood groves to desert sand dunes, have 30 species of snakes, whereas roughly twice that number occur in five square miles of lowland Costa Rican rainforest? Almost 400 species of birds, a bit more than half as many as breed in the entire continental United States, occupy that same small Central American si...

-The mid-Mesozoic time was characterized by massive reorganization of the ecological structure of benthic marine communities. Although the general pattern of this "Mesozoic Marine Revolution" has been extensively documented, little is known about how it affected the taxonomic and morphologic diversities of individual lineages of organisms. Here I document group-level dynamics of the Mesozoic ch...

Contents 1. Introduction 2. Primary stage of the occurrence of river systems 3. Development of rivers in the Paleozoic 4. Change of hydrography in the Mesozoic 5. Modification of river systems in the Cenozoic 6. Water balance change of the river basins in the Mesozoic-Cenozoic 7. Features of dynamics of the hydrographic network and channel deformations 8. Hydrography and water resources of the ...

Within modern gymnosperms, conifers and Ginkgo are exclusively wind pollinated whereas many gnetaleans and cycads are insect pollinated. For cycads, thrips are specialized pollinators. We report such a specialized pollination mode from Early Cretaceous amber of Spain, wherein four female thrips representing a genus and two species in the family Melanthripidae were covered by abundant Cycadopite...

Hepadnaviridae are double-stranded DNA viruses that infect some species of birds and mammals. This includes humans, where hepatitis B viruses (HBVs) are prevalent pathogens in considerable parts of the global population. Recently, endogenized sequences of HBVs (eHBVs) have been discovered in bird genomes where they constitute direct evidence for the coexistence of these viruses and their hosts ...