The multi-peak adaptive landscape of crocodylomorph body size evolution

Background: Little is known about the long-term patterns of body size evolution in Crocodylomorpha, the > 200-million-year-old group that includes living crocodylians and their extinct relatives. Extant crocodylians are mostly large-bodied (3–7 m) predators. However, extinct crocodylomorphs exhibit a wider range of phenotypes, and many of the earliest taxa were much smaller ( Results: Crocodylomorphs reached an early peak in body size disparity during the Late Jurassic, and underwent an essentially continual decline since then. A multi-peak Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model outperforms all other evolutionary models fitted to our data (including both uniform and non-uniform), indicating that the macroevolutionary dynamics of crocodylomorph body size are better described within the concept of an adaptive landscape, with most body size variation emerging after shifts to new macroevolutionary regimes (analogous to adaptive zones). We did not find support for a consistent evolutionary trend towards larger sizes among lineages (i.e., Cope’s rule), or strong correlations of body size with climate. Instead, the intermediate to large body sizes of some crocodylomorphs are better explained by group-specific adaptations. In particular, the evolution of a more aquatic lifestyle (especially marine) correlates with increases in average body size, though not without exceptions. Conclusions: Shifts between macroevolutionary regimes provide a better explanation of crocodylomorph body size evolution on large phylogenetic and temporal scales, suggesting a central role for lineage-specific adaptations rather than climatic forcing. Shifts leading to larger body sizes occurred in most aquatic and semi-aquatic groups. This, combined with extinctions of groups occupying smaller body size regimes (particularly during the Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic), gave rise to the upward-shifted body size distribution of extant crocodylomorphs compared to their smaller-bodied terrestrial ancestors.</p

'A Sacred Duty': Red Army women veterans remembering the Great Fatherland War, 1941-1945

Some 500,000 women fought with the Red Army in the Great Fatherland War, 1941-1945. Based on a selection of women veterans' memoirs published since the demise of the Soviet Union, this article looks at what these women choose to remember about the war, and how, and equally what they choose to forget or remain silent about. The paper seeks to illuminate shared or disparate collective and individual memory and experiences. A particular objective of the paper is to assess the degree to which these written recollections coincide with or deviate from the predominant patriotic, heroic, masculine paradigm of the Great Fatherland War and its historiography. The overall objective of the paper is to humanise the female faces behind the masculine mask of the Red Army at war against Nazism

Political tourists: travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s-1940s (book review)

Review of: Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s-1940s. Edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), xv + 312 pp. Notes. Illustrations, Bibliography, Index

Women, war and 'totalitarianism': the Soviet and Nazi experiences compared

Some 800,000 Soviet women saw military service in defence of their 'Motherland' against Hitler's onslaught during the Great Patriotic War, 1941-45. Half a million of these women actually joined the Red Army; either they volunteered or they were mobilised. Women field nurses, partisans, snipers, anti-aircraft gunners and fighter pilots became models of Soviet heroism. Female participation in military conflict on such a scale is historically unique. In stark contrast to all other combatant countries in the Second World War, in particular National Socialist Germany, Soviet women took on roles that were generally regarded as the exclusive domain of males: from heavy industrial work to front-line combat. In contrast, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union's mortal enemy, was reluctant to mobilise women for the home front let alone combat, even for total war

Rewriting history in Soviet Russia: the politics of revisionist historiography, 1956-1974

This book explores the political significance of the development of historical revisionism in the USSR under Khrushchev in the wake of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and its demise with the onset of the 'period of stagnation' under Brezhnev. On the basis of intensive interviews and original manuscript material, the book demonstrates that the vigorous rejuvenation of historiography undertaken by Soviet historians in the 1960s conceptually cleared the way for and fomented the dramatic upheaval in Soviet historical writing occasioned by the advent of perestroika

Censorship and fear: historical research in the Soviet Union

All nation states, especially emergent ones, to various degrees strive to maintain a hegemonic narrative about the past that vindicates the status quo. From time to time, such narratives come under challenge from 'revisionist' historians. Liberal, secure polities can tolerate revisionist dissent. But insecure political systems can resort to censorship and even repression of historians. Nowhere was this more true than in the former Soviet Union

Communism: Fascism's 'other'?

AT first sight, there seems much to commend in the view not only that Soviet communism and Italian Fascism were close 'totalitarian' cousins, if not twins like Stalinism and Nazism, but also that the threat of communism begat fascism in its Italian, German, and other European guises. 'Totalitarianism', a concept proudly endorsed by Mussolini in his definition of Fascism in 1932, which became common currency among Western scholars during the Cold War, has usually been identified with what Hannah Arendt called the 'radical evil' of Hitler and Stalin rather than that of Mussolini.' The latter part of this essay, however, primarily compares Stalin's Soviet Union with Mussolini's Fascist Italy, with occasional asides on Fascist Germany