The Doñana Biological Station – CSIC participates in a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural research between western and traditional Indigenous science to study the evolutionary history of the horse. This collaboration opens the way to repair history and create co-designing strategies for a more sustainable future.

Results have been published in the journal Science and show, contrary to what European historic records caputred, that Indigenous people raised horses since, at...

A scientific team led by the Doñana Biological Station analysed the evolution of life cycles and reproductive modes of all the major amphibian clades: frogs, salamanders, and caecilians. The researchers have analysed data for more than 4000 amphibian species.

This study concluded that most species reproduce by alternative modes to ancestral aquatic reproduction. The evolution of terrestrial reproduction did not occur sequentially.

An international study led by a researcher from Doñana Biological Station (EBD-CSIC) revisits the island rule in vertebrates and confirms the tendency of small-sized and large-sized species towards gigantism and dwarfism, respectively, in insular ecosystems
? The research team found that insular size shifts were more evident in remote, isolated islands

The rates of species and trait diversification vary across the Tree?of?Life and over time. Whereas species richness and clade age generally are decoupled, the correlation of accumulated trait diversity of clades (trait disparity) with clade age remains poorly explored. Total trait disparity may be coupled with clade age if the growth of disparity (disparification) within and across clades is continuous with time in an additive niche expansion process (linear?cumulative model), or...

One paradoxical finding in some mammals is the presence of male–male intrasexual competition in the absence of sexual size dimorphism. It has been a major goal of evolutionary biologists for over a century to understand why some species in which large males can monopolize multiple mates while excluding smaller competitors, exhibit little or no sexual dimorphism. In this paper three of the main hypotheses that have been proposed to explain this conundrum are examined using as study case...