It's a bit like a character in a movie going off and having adventures that change him so drastically that when he returns, the folks in his hometown no longer recognize the way he looks and behaves.

Allopatric speciation is often assumed to occur as a consequence of adaptive divergence between two isolated populations. However, there are some scenarios in which reproductive isolation can be ...

The Lepidoptera represent one of the most successful radiations of plant-feeding insects, which predominantly took place within angiosperms beginning in the Cretaceous period. Angiosperm colonization ...

A genetic study of island lizards shows that even those that have been geographically isolated for many millions of years have not evolved into separate species as predicted by conventional ...

Until recently, the overriding credo for explaining how new species are formed has run as follows: first, a population of organisms splits into several subpopulations; once isolated from other members ...

Evolutionary biologists have analyzed the role of microRNAs in the evolution of new species. The mechanisms by which new species arise are still not fully understood. What are the evolutionary ...

Trait data from more than 1,000 different vertebrate species suggests that new species often arise not because of pressures from different environments, but because of prolonged geographic separation ...