New investigation of tissues and signaling pathways in
finches' beaks reveals surprising flexibility in the birds' evolutionary
toolkit
It has long been known that diversity of form and function
in birds' specialized beaks is abundant. Charles Darwin famously studied the
finches on the Galapagos Islands, tying the morphology (shape) of various
species' beaks to the types of seeds they ate. In 2010, a team of Harvard
biologists and applied mathematicians showed that Darwin's finches all actually
shared the same developmental pathways, using the same gene products,
controlling just size and curvature, to create 14 very different beaks.