In some ways, islands provide a ready-made laboratory for studying evolution. Thanks to their isolation from each other and the mainland, islands offer an ideal venue for speciation, with Darwin's ...

The movement of lizards around the Caribbean is forcing researchers to account for human activity in even their most basic ecological models. When Matthew Helmus was about eight years old and ...

Derived from a meeting held at Harvard in October 2007 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the publication of The theory of island biogeography, by Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson.

Thomas J. Matthews is at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and at the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. The theory of ...

An anole lizard silhouetted on a rainforest leaf. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. The biggest factor determining species diversity and distribution on islands is not size and isolation, as traditional ...

Mountains are defined by their prominence, steep sides, and significant height above the surrounding regions. They harbor exceptionally high levels of biodiversity and a great number of endemic ...

Aim The seminal theory of island biogeography, based on changing rates of immigration and extinction, should be seen in a geological context, as an island's maturity influences the richness of its ...

Aim To assess the relative contributions of colonization, speciation and human activities on species richness (S) of mammalian communities among oceanic islands. Location Palaeo-islands world-wide.

A reef parrotfish on Vitoria Seamount. (Photo by Hudson Pinheiro © California Academy of Sciences) The Trindade and Martin Vaz Archipelago is the most eastward point ...

You can know a lot of things about birds just by the shape of their wings. A seafaring albatross, stretching out its sail-like airfoils, lives a very different life from a ground-dwelling antpitta ...

From Quanta (Find original story here). When Matthew Helmus was about eight years old and desperate for a pet, he saved up enough money to order a lizard through an ad in the back pages of Mad ...