Separating Wheat from Chaff in Plant Genomes 英文参考文献.docVIP

Open access, freely available online Synopses of Research Articles Ancient DNA Tells Story of Giant Eagle Evolution DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0030020 The recent discovery of a Hobbit-like hominid on the Indonesian island of Flores was startling in some respects—its rather modern existence, for one—but it represents a classic case of Darwinian evolution. For reasons that are not entirely clear, when animals make their way to isolated islands, they tend to evolve relatively quickly toward an outsized or pint-sized version of their mainland counterpart. Following this evolutionary script, the Flores woman, presumably a downsized version of Homo erectus, appears to have shared her island home with dwarf elephants and giant rats. Perhaps the most famous example of an island giant—and, sadly, of species extinction—is the dodo, once found on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. When the dodo’s ancestor (thought to be a migratory pigeon) settled on this island with abundant food, no competition from terrestrial mammals, and no predators, it could survive without ?ying, and thus was freed from the energetic and size constraints of ?ight. New Zealand also had avian giants, now extinct, including the ?ightless moa, an ostrich-like bird, and Haast’s eagle (Harpagornis moorei), which had a wingspan up to 3 meters. Though Haast’s eagle could ?y—and presumably used its wings to launch brutal attacks on the hapless moa—its body mass (10–14 kilograms) pushed the limits for self-propelled ?ight. As extreme evolutionary examples, these island birds can offer insights into the forces and events shaping evolutionary change. In a new study, Michael Bunce et al. compared ancient mitochondrial DNA extracted from Haast’s eagle bones with DNA sequences of 16 living eagle species to better characterize the evolutionary history of the extinct giant raptor.Their results suggest the extinct raptor underwent a rapid evolutionary transformation that belies its kinship to some of the world’s