Publication Date:
2015-02-24
Description:
Cope's rule proposes that animal lineages evolve toward larger body size over time. To test this hypothesis across all marine animals, we compiled a data set of body sizes for 17,208 genera of marine animals spanning the past 542 million years. Mean biovolume across genera has increased by a factor of 150 since the Cambrian, whereas minimum biovolume has decreased by less than a factor of 10, and maximum biovolume has increased by more than a factor of 100,000. Neutral drift from a small initial value cannot explain this pattern. Instead, most of the size increase reflects differential diversification across classes, indicating that the pattern does not reflect a simple scaling-up of widespread and persistent selection for larger size within populations.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Heim, Noel A -- Knope, Matthew L -- Schaal, Ellen K -- Wang, Steve C -- Payne, Jonathan L -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Feb 20;347(6224):867-70. doi: 10.1126/science.1260065.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. naheim@stanford.edu. ; Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. ; Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25700517" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
*Aquatic Organisms
;
*Biological Evolution
;
*Body Size
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
