An enduring focus of these studies has been Cope's Rule, the notion that body size tends to
increase over time within lineages (Kurtén, 1953; Stanley, 1973; Polly, 1998). Such an …

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 …

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 …

The tendency for the mean body size of taxa within a clade to increase through evolution
(Cope's Rule) has been demonstrated in a number of terrestrial vertebrate groups. However …

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 …

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 …

Calder's (1984) lament is curiously misplaced in the realm of paleontology (Fleagle, 1978),
perhaps because “size” is one of those rare characteristics of an extinct organism that can …

The distribution of species body size is critically important for determining resource use
within a group or clade. It is widely known that non-avian dinosaurs were the largest …

Although the interspecific scaling of tetrapods is well understood, remarkably little work has
been done on the ontogenetic scaling within tetrapod species, whether fossil or recent. Here …

Body size is of fundamental importance in understanding macroevolutionary patterns, both
for extant taxa and for those with a fossil record. In this paper we describe four different kinds …