Analysis of Growth Models in Galician × Nelore Crossbred Cattle in the First Year of Life.

The veal niche market is gaining momentum in Brazil. Locally known as 'Vitelão', veal refers to the meat from calves slaughtered up to 12 months of age. In this study, we assessed the Galician Blond × Nelore cross as a candidate to produce veal.

Trait-mediated speciation and human-driven extinctions in proboscideans revealed by unsupervised Bayesian neural networks.

Species life-history traits, paleoenvironment, and biotic interactions likely influence speciation and extinction rates, affecting species richness over time. Birth-death models inferring the impact of these factors typically assume monotonic relationships between single predictors and rates, limiting our ability to assess more complex effects and their relative importance and interaction. We introduce a Bayesian birth-death model using unsupervised neural networks to explore multifactorial and nonlinear effects on speciation and extinction rates using fossil data.

The reorganization of predator-prey networks over 20 million years explains extinction patterns of mammalian carnivores.

Linking the species interactions occurring at the scale of local communities to their potential impact at evolutionary timescales is challenging. Here, we used the high-resolution fossil record of mammals from the Iberian Peninsula to reconstruct a timeseries of trophic networks spanning more than 20 million years and asked whether predator-prey interactions affected regional extinction patterns. We found that, despite small changes in species richness, trophic networks showed long-term trends, gradually losing interactions and becoming sparser towards the present.

Early Jurassic origin of avian endothermy and thermophysiological diversity in dinosaurs.

A fundamental question in dinosaur evolution is how they adapted to long-term climatic shifts during the Mesozoic and when they developed environmentally independent, avian-style acclimatization, becoming endothermic. The ability of warm-blooded dinosaurs to flourish in harsher environments, including cold, high-latitude regions, raises intriguing questions about the origins of key innovations shared with modern birds, indicating that the development of homeothermy (keeping constant body temperature) and endothermy (generating body heat) played a crucial role in their ecological diversification. Despite substantial evidence across scientific disciplines (anatomy, reproduction, energetics, biomechanics, osteohistology, palaeobiogeography, geochemistry, and soft tissues), a consensus on dinosaur thermophysiology remains elusive.

Plio-Pleistocene African megaherbivore losses associated with community biomass restructuring.

Fossil abundance data can reveal ecological dynamics underpinning taxonomic declines. Using fossil dental metrics, we reconstructed body mass and mass-abundance distributions in Late Miocene to recent African large mammal communities. Despite collection biases, fossil and extant mass-abundance distributions are highly similar, with unimodal distributions likely reflecting savanna environments.