The distribution of species body size within taxonomic groups exhibits a heavy right tail
extending over many orders of magnitude, where most species are much larger than the …

The notion that large body size confers some intrinsic advantage to biological species has
been debated for centuries. Using a phylogenetic statistical approach that allows the rate of …

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 …

Cope's rule proposes that animal lineages evolve toward larger body size over time. To test
this hypothesis across all marine animals, we compiled a data set of body sizes for 17,208 …

Several theories predict that rates of phenotypic evolution should be related to the rate at
which new lineages arise. However, drawing general conclusions regarding the coupling …

Body mass estimates for 1534 North American fossil mammal species show that new
species are on average 9.1% larger than older species in the same genera. This within …

The diversity of body sizes of organisms has traditionally been explained in terms of
microevolutionary processes: natural selection owing to differential fitness of individual …

Body size correlates with virtually every aspect of species biology, so understanding the
tempo and mode of its evolution is of key importance in macroecology and macroevolution …

There is accumulating evidence that macroevolutionary patterns of mammal evolution
during the Cenozoic follow similar trajectories on different continents. This would suggest …

Several scenarios have been proposed to explain rapid net size increases in some early
Cenozoic mammalian lineages: sustained and gradual directional change, successive …