An international team of 114 scientists has performed the most comprehensive study of aging and longevity to date with data collected in the wild from 107 populations of 77 species of reptiles and amphibians worldwide.
Researchers at University College Cork (UCC) and the Swedish Museum of Natural History examined the end-Permian mass extinction (252 million years ago) that eliminated almost every species on Earth, with entire ecosystems collapsing.
Researchers have identified a specific bacterial microbe that, when fed to honey bee larvae, can reduce the effects of nutritional stress on developing bees.
The earth doesn’t give up its secrets easily – not even in the “Cradle of Humankind” in South Africa, where a wealth of fossils relating to human evolution have been found.
Using biological experiments, robot models, and a geometric theory of locomotion, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology investigated how and why intermediate lizard species, with their elongated bodies and short limbs, might use their bodies to move. They uncovered the existence of a previously unknown spectrum of body movements in lizards, revealing a continuum of locomotion dynamics between lizardlike and snakelike movements.
Even with plenty of fish in the sea, sea dragons stand out from the crowd. The funky, fabulous fish are bedecked with ruffly leaf-like adornments. Their spines are kinked. They’re missing their ribs and their teeth. And the responsibility of pregnancy is taken on by the males. By sequencing the genomes of two species of sea dragons, University of Oregon researchers have found genetic clues to the fish’s distinctive features: They’re missing a key group of genes found in other vertebrates. Those genes help direct the development of the face, teeth and appendages, as well as parts of the nervous system.
Human populations have waxed and waned over the millennia, with some cultures exploding and migrating to new areas or new continents, others dropping to such low numbers that their genetic diversity plummeted.
An international team led by The University of Vienna and the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in collaboration with the National Museum of Korea has successfully sequenced and studied the whole genome of eight 1,700-year-old individuals dated to the Three Kingdoms period of Korea (approx. 57 BC-668 AD). The first published genomes from this period in Korea and bring key information for the understanding of Korean population history. The Team has been led by Pere Gelabert and Prof. Ron Pinhasi of the University of Vienna together with Prof. Jong Bhak and Asta Blazyte from the UNIST and Prof. Kidong Bae from the National Museum of Korea.
Frog-eating bats trained by researchers to associate a phone ringtone with a tasty treat were able to remember what they learned for up to four years in the wild, new research has found.
A wasp that has already caused major damage in the Southern Hemisphere could spread throughout North America, although nature’s defenses are currently keeping the insect under control, according to a Dartmouth study.
A fossilized lower jaw has led an international team of palaeontologists, headed by Bastien Mennecart from the Natural History Museum Basel, to discover a new species of predator that once lived in Europe.
Studying the unusual social behaviour of an Australian native bee has enabled Flinders University researchers to obtain a clear understanding about the earliest stages of social evolution.
Studying two highly divergent phyla of worms that contain numerous parasites that cause human and livestock diseases, the research group of Qi Zhou from the University of Vienna and Zhejiang University, sheds light on how sexual reproduction and subsequent great diversity of sex chromosomes might have evolved.
The structure of how DNA is stored in archaea makes a significant difference to how quickly it evolves, according to a new study by Indiana University researchers.
A group of researchers from CONICET and the University of Utah demonstrated that during the time of the first dinosaurs, variations in the diversity and abundance of the plant and vertebrate animal species cannot be related to the climatic changes recorded throughout its deposition, in contrast with previous hypotheses.
Princeton geneticist Stephen Gaughran recently confirmed that 'Fernanda' comes from the same species as a tortoise collected from Fernandina Island more than a century ago, and those two are genetically distinct from all other Galápagos tortoises.
DNA analysis of ancient human remains has shed new light on an "explosion" of intermixing cultures and genetics in an island region north of Australia known as Wallacea - an imprint that is still detectable in East Indonesians today.
Sleep regulation in a worm is not as different from sleep regulation in mammals, including humans, as you may think. Therefore, knowing how worms switch between being asleep and being awake can tell us a lot of useful information about sleep patterns in humans and what cells regulate them.
Gathering vision data for hundreds of vertebrates and invertebrates, University of Arkansas biologists have deepened scientists’ understanding of animal vision, including the colors they see.
Universidade de Quioto adaptou o sistema humano de codificação de acção facial, ou FACS, como uma ferramenta para comparações sistemáticas de músculos faciais entre espécies. As contrações musculares faciais movem porções da pele, produzindo um conjunto de mudanças de aparência que são visíveis no rosto. O FACS analisa e classifica os movimentos visíveis feitos pelos músculos faciais através das chamadas unidades de acção.
A small, rare crayfish thought to be extinct for 30 years has been rediscovered in a cave in the City of Huntsville in northern Alabama by a team led by an assistant professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).
Deep in the forests of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh in India lives a colourful gecko species that only now revealed its true identity. Meet Eublepharis pictus, also known as the Painted Leopard Gecko.
Megatooth sharks like, Otodus megalodon, more commonly known as megalodon, lived between 23 and 3.6 million years ago in oceans around the globe and possibly reached as large as 20 metres in length.
The first successfully sequenced human genome from an individual who died in Pompeii, Italy, after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE is presented this week in a study published in Scientific Reports.
The raw material for evolution is much more abundant in wild animals than we previously believed, according to new research from The Australian National University (ANU).
Ana Mateos and Jesús Rodríguez, scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), have published an experimental energy study in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, which shows that children and adolescents can walk at a speed close to the optimal pace for adults, with hardly any locomotion energy costs or departing from their own optimal speed.
The intriguing Australian sleepy lizard has raised new questions about vertebrate immunity after the surprise discovery of the evolutionary disappearance of genes needed for some T cell production in squamates.
Salamanders that live their entire lives in the crowns of the world's tallest trees, California's coast redwoods, have evolved a behavior well-adapted to the dangers of falling from high places: the ability to parachute, glide and maneuver in mid-air.
A new examination of the way different tissues read information from genes has discovered that the brain and testes appear to be extraordinarily open to the use of many different kinds of code to produce a given protein.
What links a finger bone and some fossil teeth found in a cave in the remote Altai Mountains of Siberia to a single tooth found in a cave in the limestone landscapes of tropical Laos?
Humans are the only species on earth known to use language. We do this by combining sounds to form words and words to form hierarchically structured sentences.
In a study published in the journal Nature Communications, Andrea Mundl-Petermeier and Sebastian Viehmann of the Department of Lithospheric Research at the University of Vienna have demonstrated that a new geochemical archive - 182Tungsten in banded iron formations - can be used to simultaneously trace both the evolution of the Earth's mantle and continents throughout Earth’s history. This offers new opportunities to better understand the Precambrian Earth in the future.
Jars of tiny platypus and echidna specimens, collected in the late 1800s by the scientist William Caldwell, have been discovered in the stores of Cambridge’s University Museum of Zoology.
The cnidocytes – or stinging cells – that are characteristic of sea anemones, hydrae, corals and jellyfish, and make us careful of our feet while wading in the ocean, are also an excellent model for understanding the emergence of new cell types, according to new Cornell research.
New research examines how cavefish developed unique metabolic adaptations to survive in nutrient-scarce environments. The study created a genome-wide map of liver tissue for two independent colonies of cavefish along with river fish to understand how cavefish metabolism evolved and how this may be applicable for humans.
From embryo to turtle cracker: a team led by palaeobiologist Julia Türtscher from the University of Vienna studied the multiple changes in tooth shape in the tiger shark. The study, recently published in the Journal of Anatomy, is also central in drawing conclusions about extinct species from the myriad of preserved shark teeth in the field of palaeontology.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University, and the University of Naples, have examined the mass extinction of large animals over the past tens of thousands of years and found that extinct species had, on average, much smaller brains than species that survived.