"We also see an increase in the types of insect mouth parts," Leslie says, so insects could have broadened their diets to include conifer cones.
Then I collected conifer cones and measured how fast crossbills could remove seeds from average-sized cones from each of the four conifers.
Although I suspected that selection exerted on cones by red squirrels had contributed greatly to the evolution of other conifers including black spruce, I still had no evidence that crossbills have an evolutionary effect on conifer cones.
When red squirrels forage on conifer cones, they start at the base and bite off successive scales to reach the underlying seeds that tend to be concentrated at the distal end of the cone.
Contemporary smart building systems typically aim to reduce building energy use by means of technologically enabled climate-responsiveness; however, these technologies lack the efficiency and elegance of naturally responsive mechanisms employing the inherent properties of available materials, such as the moisture-induced opening and closing of conifer cones.
The fruit bodies (mushrooms) grow on conifer litter or on conifer cones that may be partially or completely buried in soil.
During the autumn they become dark brown to black in colour, hard, somewhat woody, and superficially similar to small conifer cones.
In elongate conifer cones, the limiting factor was height; in short and wide conifer cones, it was diameter.
In the case of the fossil conifer cones, these internal structures were primarily the seeds, vascular system, or cone scales.
Because the conifer cones were of various heights and diameters, resolution was variable, ranging from 28 μm voxel size for the smallest cones to 135 μm for the most elongate cones.
