The largest known dinosaurs weighed at least 20 million times as much as the smallest,
indicating exceptional phenotypic divergence. Previous studies have focused on extreme …

Theevolutionofbodysizeanditsinfluenceonor… received scientific attention since the earliest
decades of evolutionary study (eg, Cope, 1887, 1896; Thompson, 1917). Both …

Cope's rule is the tendency for body size to increase over time along a lineage. A set of 65
phylogenetically independent comparisons, between earlier and later genera, show that …

Cope's rule is the trend toward increasing body size in a lineage over geological time. The
rule has been explained either as passive diffusion away from a small initial body size or as …

A major macroevolutionary question concerns how long-term patterns of body-size evolution
are underpinned by smaller scale processes along lineages. One outstanding long-term …

In amniotes, the predominant developmental strategy underlying body size evolution is
thought to be adjustments to the rate of growth rather than its duration. However, most …

Dinosaurs were large-bodied land animals of the Mesozoic that gave rise to birds. They
played a fundamental role in structuring Jurassic–Cretaceous ecosystems and had …

Large-scale adaptive radiations might explain the runaway success of a minority of extant
vertebrate clades. This hypothesis predicts, among other things, rapid rates of morphological …

Some of the longest standing questions in dinosaur paleontology pertain to their
development. Did dinosaurs grow at slow rates similar to extant reptiles or rapidly similar to …

The extinction of dinosaurs at the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary was the seminal
event that opened the door for the subsequent diversification of terrestrial mammals. Our …