Thank you Max!

One implication is that measures of relative brain size should be treated with extreme caution. The curvilinear pattern across species may, for example, explain why large bodied species have been though to be relatively small brained when using linear models to characterise and account for scaling

This has implications for how we interpret macroevolutionary patterns more generally, emphasising the need to account for intraspecific variation in order to understand variation across species

We then show that this pattern is a metaphenomenon arising from a pattern of diminishing allometry within species with increasing size

We were very surprised at how consistent this is across the tree of life

In our new paper, we find that this curve is universal (or very nearly, with a few minor exceptions) including not just homeothermic vertebrates, but also fish, amphibians, squamates and even insects

This has substantial implications for understanding the evolution of brain size

We previously found that the scaling of brain to body mass in mammals is not, as assumed for the past 100 years, log-linear. It is curved: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Good luck! 🤞