What is the first image that comes to mind when you think of evolution? Possibly a line of cartoon primates marching, slouching monkeys at one end and naked men with spears at the other. Or a branching tree diagram where each twig represents an organism, maybe with a tentative “I think” scribbled above it. Alternatively, you may have pictured an illustration of related birds from isolated islands, each showing a dramatically different bill shape adapted to a different diet. Darwin’s Galápagos finches represent a foundational influence in terms of where we tend to look for signs of evolution and what we expect these signs to look like. Our new paper, just published Open Access in Zoologischer Anzeiger: A Journal of Comparative Zoology, provides a contrasting image. We looked at the Sulawesi babbler (Pellorneum celebense), a dull brown bird that spends its time hiding in bushes on less isolated islands in Indonesia, looking pretty similar from one island to the next. Nevertheless, we found that several of its populations are quite different from one another in mitochondrial DNA, in morphology, and in song.
Continue reading “Evolution in the understorey”Evolution in the understorey
