Henry Gee, Rory Howlett, and Philip Campbell of Nature magazine have compiled a list of 15 scientific discoveries that have been included in Nature over the past decade or so that lend credence to the theory of evolution by natural selection. They call these “Evolutionary Gems.” (For more detailed information on each, you can click on the individual items.) They are divided into three categories as follows:
Gems from the fossil record
1 Land-living ancestors of whales
2 From water to land
3 The origin of feathers
4 The evolutionary history of teeth
5 The origin of the vertebrate skeleton
Gems from habitats
6 Natural selection in speciation
7 Natural selection in lizards
8 A case of co-evolution
9 Differential dispersal in wild birds
10 Selective survival in wild guppies
11 Evolutionary history matters
Gems from molecular processes
12 Darwin’s Galapagos finches
13 Microevolution meets macroevolution
14 Toxin resistance in snakes and clams
15 Variation versus stability
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