Macroecological correlates of Darwinian shortfalls across terrestrial vertebrates.

Most described species have not been explicitly included in phylogenetic trees-a problem named the Darwinian shortfall-owing to a lack of molecular and/or morphological data, thus hampering the explicit incorporation of evolution into large-scale biodiversity analyses. We investigate potential drivers of the Darwinian shortfall in tetrapods, a group in which at least one-third of described species still lack phylogenetic data, thus necessitating the imputation of their evolutionary relationships in fully sampled phylogenies. We show that the number of preserved specimens in scientific collections is the main driver of phylogenetic knowledge accumulation, highlighting the major role of biological collections in unveiling novel biodiversity data and the importance of continued sampling efforts to reduce knowledge gaps.

Environmental drivers of tropical forest snake phenology: Insights from citizen science.

Museum specimens and citizen science initiatives are valuable sources of information on how anthropogenic activities affect biodiversity and how species respond to rapid global change. Although tropical regions harbor most of the planet's biodiversity, investigations on species' phenological changes are heavily biased toward temperate regions. Such unevenness in phenological research is also taxonomically biased, with reptiles being the least studied group among tetrapod species regarding animal phenology.

Unwrapping broken tails: Biological and environmental correlates of predation pressure in limbless reptiles.

Studying species interactions in nature often requires elaborated logistics and intense fieldwork. The difficulties in such task might hinder our ability to answer questions on how biotic interactions change with the environment. Fortunately, a workaround to this problem lies within scientific collections.

A new tale of lost tails: Correlates of tail breakage in the worm lizard .

Predator-prey interactions are important evolutionary drivers of defensive behaviors, but they are usually difficult to record. This lack of data on natural history and ecological interactions of species can be overcome through museum specimens, at least for some reptiles. When facing aggressive interactions, reptile species may exhibit the defensive behavior of autotomy by losing the tail, which is also known as "urotomy".