L3 - Evolution Gems Flashcards
What are the mechanisms of change?
Mutation, migration, genetic drift, natural selection.
What is modification and adaptation?
Modifications favoured by natural selection for its current function are adaptations that help an organism survive and/or reproduce in its current environment. A behaviour that allows better evasion of predators, a protein that functions better at body temperature, an anatomical feature that allows the organism to access a valuable new resource.
What are the land living ancestors of whales?
The raoellid indohyusis similar to whales, and unlike other aritiodactyles, in the structure of its ears and premolars, in the density of its limb bones and in the stable-oxygen-isotope composition of its teeth. A ‘missing link’
How have ancestors developed from water to land?
An intermediate between fish with fins and tetrapods with limbs, and provides unique insights into how and in what order important tetrapod characters arose.
What is the origin of feathers?
Two dinosaur specimens that have interesting structures that could provide information about the origin of feathers.
How is there natural selection in lizards?
The presence of the larger predator selected for longer-legged male. A. sagrei lizards, which can run faster, and also favoured larger females, which are both faster and harder to subdue and ingest.
What is a case of co-evolution?
Dormant stages of both the water flea Daphnia and its microparasites are conserved in lake sediments, providing an archive of past gene pools. Here we use this fact to reconstruct rapid coevolutionary dynamics in a natural setting and show that the parasite rapidly adapts to its host over a period of only a few yrs.
How is there selective survival in wild guppies?
Manipulated the frequencies of males with different colour patterns in three natural populations to estimate survival rates, and found that rare phenotypes had a highly significant survival advantage compared to common phenotypes.
What is the eel eating mechanism?
The mechanism of the moray’s pharyngeal jaws are reminiscent of the ratchet mechanisms used by snakes - also, long, thin and highly predatory creatures. This is an instance of convergence, the evolutionary phenomenon in which distantly related creatures evolve similar solutions to common problems.
What is toxin resistance?
Identification of a molecular structure of a sodium channel expressed in snake skeletal muscle, tsNaV1.4 that are responsible for differences in tetrodotoxin (TTX) resistance among garter snake populations coevolving with toxic newts.
