That "B:" in the aim-your-pointer text before Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences of course stands for "Bat." And "scat" in the aim-your-pointer text is a form of music, played widely in Southern California.
(But seriously, folks, evolutionary biology is my kind of Science News at ScienceDaily.
Bat skulls and faces, by E. Dumont at UMass Amherst
My kind of Science despite (or because of?) the fact I couldn't even finish the first chapter of Professor Watson's classic textbook "The Evolutionary Biology of the Gene" -- not having taken biology in high school. And I gave away my copy of the book almost a year ago.)
"A new study involving bat skulls, bite force measurements and scat samples collected by an international team of evolutionary biologists is helping to solve a nagging question of evolution: Why some groups of animals develop scores of different species over time while others evolve only a few. Their findings appear in the current issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
To answer this question, Elizabeth Dumont at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Liliana Dávalos of Stony Brook University together with colleagues at UCLA and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, compiled large amounts of data on the diet, bite force and skull shape in a family of New World bats, and took advantage of new statistical techniques to date and document changes in the rate of evolution of these traits and the number of species over time."
But I'll leave you on your own now, gentle readers, and you don't even have submit a summary of the article at ScienceDaily before leaving for Xmas Vacation. Just click here.
