[evo.theory] Friday 11:00am in the Bozo Reading Room

[Brett Calcott]

Hi all,

This friday we shall meet to chat about Beetle Horns (another paper
from the PNAS special on the evolution of complexity). I've attached
the paper.

The venue and time will be slightly different this week. We meet at
11am, in the Bozo Reading room. This is down the stairs near the
Meeting room (where we met last week), next to the herbarium.

Hope to see you there,
Brett


On the origin and evolutionary diversification of beetle horns

Douglas J. Emlen, Laura Corley Lavine, and Ben Ewen-Campen*

Many scarab beetles produce rigid projections from the body called
horns. The exaggerated sizes of these structures and the staggering
diversity of their forms have impressed biologists for centuries.
Recent comparative studies using DNA sequence-based phylogenies have
begun to reconstruct the historical patterns of beetle horn evolution.
At the same time, developmental genetic experiments have begun to
elucidate how beetle horns grow and how horn growth is modulated in
response to environmental variables, such as nutrition. We bring
together these two perspectives to show that they converge on very
similar conclusions regarding beetle evolution. Horns do not appear to
be difficult structures to gain or lose, and they can diverge both
dramatically and rapidly in form. Although much of this work is still
preliminary, we use available information to propose a conceptual
developmental model for the major trajectories of beetle horn
evolution. We illustrate putative mechanisms underlying the
evolutionary origin of horns and the evolution of horn location,
shape, allometry, and dimorphism



-- 
Brett Calcott
Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, AND
Centre for Macroevolution & Macroecology, School of Botany & Zoology,
AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY,
Canberra, ACT, 0200, AUSTRALIA
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