Gene that controls for animal size may have been identified
From ScienceDaily: The birder and biologist was Tom Smith, who has spent his career studying finches — specifically, black-bellied seedcrackers (Pyrenestes ostrinus) — in Cameroon and in his lab at the University of California-Los Angeles. He and his colleagues have spent years investigating why some of these finches have small beaks while others have large beaks. Much of their original work identified differences in the hardness of the seeds they eat, a story quite similar to that of Darwin’s finches. Smith, who is a professor at UCLA as well as the founding director of the Center for Tropical Research, established a breeding colony of these finches to understand the inheritance of beak size. The result was startlingly and elegantly simple: Read More ›