Nature Reviews Biodiversity, Published online: 05 September 2025; doi:10.1038/s44358-025-00084-3Historical ecology uses a wide and varied range of sources to investigate long-term dynamics of ecosystems, species and their traits, and different dimensions of nature–human interactions. This Perspective discusses the value of this approach for biodiversity and conservation science, and offers a strategy for the continued development of the field.

Mammals often follow peculiar evolutionary trajectories on islands, with some Pleistocene insular large mammals exhibiting reduced relative brain size. However, the antiquity of this phenomenon remains unclear. Here, we report the first digital endocast ...