Sentence examples for evolutionary size from inspiring English sources

If the Flores skeleton is evidence of the kind of evolutionary size change more associated with animals such as rats and elephants, this, says Brown "is a clear indicator" of human-like creatures "behaving like all other mammals in terms of their interactions with the environment".

Given the inferred phylogeny, the scientists estimated that flower diameter among the plants in the evolutionary lineage of R. arnoldii underwent about a 73-fold increase over about 46 million years, one of the most dramatic cases of evolutionary size increase reported for any plant or animal.

One of the most commonly used ways of investigating interactions between physiological and ecological determinants of body size and how these might result in evolutionary size change (or stasis) is by examination of the form of and influences on the size frequency distributions of organisms.

Once sauropods had evolved to a body size sufficient to protect them from theropod predation, their evolutionary size increase might have come to a halt because of the selective disadvantages of large body size (Table 2).

Evolutionary size increase in 'prosauropods' was obviously not linear: based on the phylogenetic hypotheses of Yates (2004, 2007), one of the smallest known 'prosauropods', Anchisaurus, with an estimated mass of less than 50 kg (Peczkis, 1994), is more closely related to sauropods than several taxa that exceeded 1 t.

On the other hand, with predation pressure potentially being the dominant force driving evolutionary body size increase in herbivores, limitations to theropod body size other than prey availability (e.g. biomechanical limits to their bipedal body plan) may have affected maximum body size in sauropods.

This profound evolutionary body size increase over four orders of magnitude begs the question of the applicability of Cope's Rule (Polly, 1998; Hone & Benton, 2005; Hone et al., 2005; Carrano, 2006).

In an evolutionary context, size-related shape differences in faces will evolve if body size is the main target of selection.

Another management target with likely strong ecological and evolutionary responses, size-dependent harvest (Conover and Munch 2002; Olsen et al. 2004; Thériault et al. 2008), not only will directly reduce body size range of older fish, but it could also indirectly limit the range of emergence dates if larger fish spawn earlier.

Effective Sample Sizes (ESS) for mean evolutionary rate, population size and posterior likelihood were found to be > 200 for all the models used.

Size is a evolutionary important factor, and size is often the dominant factor influencing trait variances and covariances [49].