Discover, rate, and discuss biology preprints.

The paper uses linear morphometrics to test sexual dimorphism in Uintatherium anceps and finds no strong evidence of it, contrasting with findings in Bison bison.

The paper uses computational simulations to analyze tooth marks on a 1.2 Ma hippopotamus femur, suggesting it was bitten by Pachycrocuta brevirostris and characterizing its tooth pit morphology.

This paper provides population-specific marine reservoir offsets (ΔR) for walrus-derived radiocarbon dates, revealing inter-population variability and refining Arctic chronologies and medieval trade timelines.

This study compares bone preservation in wet and dry underwater cave environments using taphonomic analysis of domesticated animal remains from two sites in South Australia.

Bone modification analyses, tooth enamel radiocarbon dates, and dental calculus microfossils indicate that Late Pleistocene humans exploited at least five megaherbivore species at a savannah watering hole in Venezuela.

This paper evaluates methods for accounting for ontogenetic variation in paleontology using alligator microCT data, finding flaws in common approaches and identifying invariant characters for taxonomic analysis.

This paper reports new fossil freshwater fish taxa from Pliocene formations in northern Colombia, suggesting historical connectivity between Amazon-Orinoco and trans-Andean drainages.

This study compiles data from fossil, historical, and modern studies to show that marine ectotherms generally decrease in body size during hyperthermal events, with stronger responses to higher warming magnitudes.

This study re-examines phloem-like tissues in 407-million-year-old Rhynie chert fossils, identifying them as food-conducting cells lacking true phloem features and suggesting phloem evolved gradually after xylem.

This study examines how extinction patterns varied over time in early vertebrates, showing shifts from clustered to overdispersed extinction during key evolutionary periods.

This study analyzes 148 fossil and subfossil lagomorph specimens from Lagoa Santa, Brazil, revealing taxonomic and taphonomic patterns across Pleistocene and Holocene deposits.

This paper investigates how reproductive mode influenced community dynamics and diversity patterns in Ediacaran animal communities, finding that stolon reproduction limited diversification until the onset of sexual reproduction.

The paper compares dark cells in Paleozoic liverworts with oil body cells in modern liverworts, finding they are homologous structures with similar distribution and function.

The paper provides high-precision U-Pb zircon ages for ash beds in the Hell Creek Formation, establishing absolute ages for the lower portion and refining the formation's basal age and duration.

Cambrian luolishaniid lobopodian appendage mesh spacing scales sublinearly with body length, and their predator-prey size ratios match modern suspension feeders rather than raptorial chaetognaths.

Using the share of AMELY-specific among all sex-specific amelogenin peptides (RAMELY), enamel proteomes are sexed consistently across four search engines, tolerating false-positive AMELY hits without manual checks.

The paper calculates the surface area of lamellae in trilobite exopodites and finds it increases exponentially with body size, supporting their function as respiratory structures.

This paper develops a method for estimating body volume and mass of plesiosaurs using skeletal reconstructions and volumetric-density approaches, finding trunk length and dorsal vertebrae dimensions as the best size proxies.

Fifty micro-CT-scanned archaeological petrous bones from Argentina did not differ significantly from 43 unscanned ones on six ancient DNA metrics, motivating a multi-step workflow that scans bones before destructive sampling.

Excavation of the 1.78 Ma Emiliano Aguirre Korongo site and landscape surveys across Olduvai Gorge Bed II reveal systematic early Pleistocene hominin butchery and percussive bone breakage of elephants.