The Macro Library^(beta)
A collection of macroevolutionary examples for K-12 teachers, students, and publishers

Welcome to The Macro Library!

Here we have attempted to assemble a diverse set of macroevolutionary examples for K-12 teachers, publishers, and pre-college or lower division college students, with loose licensing restrictions to encourage sharing.

While this is a community effort, we emphasize that we are not a "Wiki" project such as Wikipedia. We instead have chosen to blend communal contribution and peer review by enabling anyone to submit a contribution, which is then reviewed for accuracy by experts in the field. We enable users to submit complex documents with images, citations, footnotes, and definitions without knowledge of HTML in hopes of reaching the greatest number of potential contributers.

We also host a large phylogeny of extant tetrapods and many extinct ones, both for use as a reference and for navigation of articles.

The Macro Library is affiliated with the UC Museum of Paleontology and Understanding Evolution.

Featured Articles

It is common knowledge that the best hearing in the animal kingdom is generally reserved for the mammals. Why is this the case? The answer lies in the modification of the mammal jaw, back in a time when dinosaurs still ruled the land. Read more ...

How did life get out from the sea onto the land? The story of the land-sea transition is a classic example of macroevolutionary principles, with the adaptions for brackish water exapted to take vertebrates first tentative steps onto the land. Read more ...

Recent Evolution News:

By analysing the embryological origin of snake jaws and the tracking of the Sonic Hedghog (shh) gene, scientists have been able to resolve some of the evolutionary origin and development of snake fangs, with the results published in the July 31 2008 edition of Nature.

doi:10.1038/nature07178. Image modified from Figure 1 in the paper.
Used with permission.