Feature Channels: Evolution and Darwin

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A team of Peruvian and American scientists have uncovered the 18-million-year-old remains of the smallest fossil monkey ever found.

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Genetic changes are necessary for species to evolve and adapt to new environments. However, how can one predict such genetic changes? A new study led by Stony Brook University researchers reveals that this may be possible at a molecular level.

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A remarkable bioluminescent click beetle was discovered in the subtropical evergreen broadleaf forests in southwest China.

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Scientists have given a fascinating new insight into the way microbes adopt a 'co-operative' approach to securing the nutrients they need to thrive.

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University of Rhode Island anthropology professor Holly Dunsworth and four geneticists refute a common analogy comparing dog breeds with human races in a peer-reviewed, scholarly paper published by the online journal Evolution: Education and Outreach.

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Mount Sinai researchers working as part of an international team have discovered previously unknown breastfeeding patterns of an extinct early human species by studying their 2-million-year-old teeth, providing insights into the evolution of human breastfeeding practices, according to a study published in Nature in July.

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Published in Nature Microbiology, a new study has investigated the origin and evolution of a virus called crAssphage, which may have coevolved with human lineage.

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Northern Arizona University biologist Liza Holeski received an NIH grant to study a distinct pigmentation pattern that evolved recently among a wild population of crimson monkeyflowers.

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The males of one species of butterfly are more attracted to females that are active, not necessarily what they look like, according to a recent research conducted at Augustana University.The paper, “Behaviour before beauty: Signal weighting during mate selection in the butterfly Papilio polytes,” found that males of the species noticed the activity levels of potential female mates, not their markings.

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Mackerel sharks (Lamniformes) are a group consisting of some of the most iconic sharks we know, including the mako shark (the fastest shark in the world), the infamous great white shark and Megalodon, the biggest predatory shark that has ever roamed  the world’s oceans.

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Nobel Prize-winning Directed evolution is an artificial, sped up process to make a protein perform a specified task. UNC School of Medicine scientists created a powerful new directed evolution technique for the rapid development of scientific tools and new treatments for many diseases.

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Climbing the social ladder is a ruff business for dogs, new research shows.

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New to science species of Australian jumping spider was named after Hamburg-born fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld (1933-2019) after the arachnid reminded its discoverers of the designer.

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When an asteroid smacked into the Earth 66 million years ago, it triggered mass extinctions all over the planet.

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A surprise discovery in a Crimean cave suggests that early Europeans lived alongside some of the largest ever known birds, according to new research published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

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Scientists have discovered how plants create networks of air channels - the lungs of the leaf - to transport carbon dioxide (CO2) to their cells.

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Throughout life's history on earth, biological diversity has gone through ebbs and flows -- periods of rapid evolution and of dramatic extinctions.

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Heather Lynch, PhD, of Stony Brook University, has been named a winner of the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists in the category of Life Sciences. The award includes a $250,000 unrestricted scientific prize.

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Instead of the typical bell-shaped curve, the fossil record shows a fat-tailed distribution, with extreme, outlier, events occurring with higher-than-expected probability. Using the same mathematical tools that describe stock market crashes, Santa Fe Institute scientists explain the evolutionary dynamics that give rise to universal patterns in the fossil record.

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The ice worm is one of the largest organisms that spends its entire life in ice and Washington State University scientist Scot Hotalilng is one of the only people on the planet studying it.

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Human screams convey a level of individual identity that may help explain their evolutionary origins, finds a study by scientists at Emory University.

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Oxygen concentrations in both the open ocean and coastal waters have declined by 2-5% since at least the middle of the 20th century.

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Fossils of a giant new species from the long-extinct group of sea creatures called trilobites have been found on Kangaroo Island, South Australia. The finding is adding important insights to our knowledge of the Cambrian ‘explosion’, the greatest diversification event in the history of life on Earth.

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A first-of-its-kind study illuminates which marine species may have the ability to survive in a world where temperatures are rising and oceans are becoming acidic.

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University of Utah biologists demonstrated real-time adaptation in their lab that triggered reproductive isolation in just four years. They began with a single population of parasitic feather lice, split the population in two and transferred them onto different-sized hosts—pigeons with small feathers, and pigeons with large feathers. The pigeons preened at the lice and populations adapted quickly by evolving differences in body size. When paired together, males and females that were too different or too similar in size laid zero eggs.

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New research on the evolutionary relationships between tree sloths and their extinct giant relatives is challenging decades of widely accepted scientific research.

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A team of researchers led by the University of California San Diego have discovered what’s responsible for making the teeth of the deep-sea dragonfish transparent. This unique adaptation, which helps camouflage the dragonfish from their prey, results from their teeth having an unusually crystalline nanostructure mixed with amorphous regions. The findings could provide “bioinspiration” for researchers looking to develop transparent ceramics.

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Slow-evolving elephant shark reveals hormonal adaptation and offers new insights into human physiology.

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A new study by researchers at the University of Virginia and other institutions has discovered a type of pigment cell in zebrafish that can transform after development into another cell type.

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One researcher at the University of Tokyo is in hot pursuit of dinosaurs, tracking extinct species around ancient Earth.

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One researcher at the University of Tokyo is in hot pursuit of dinosaurs, tracking extinct species around ancient Earth.

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Did ancient supernovae induce proto-humans to walk on two legs, eventually resulting in homo sapiens with hands free to build cathedrals, design rockets and snap iPhone selfies?

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Scientists from the University of Bristol and the Natural History Museum in London have reconstructed the evolutionary history of the chelicerates

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Most living things have a suite of genes dedicated to repairing their DNA, limiting the rate at which their genomes change through time.

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Chimps’ ability to work out how to excavate underground food with tools may indicate how ancient hominins did likewise

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The first humans who settled in Scandinavia more than 10,000 years ago left their DNA behind in ancient chewing gums

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UNLV geoscientist, student among international research team behind discovery of ancient monkey species that lived in Africa 22 million years ago.

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A new study is providing insight into how the pursuit of starch may have driven evolutionary adaptations in mammals. The research, conducted on 46 mammal species, focuses on a biological compound called amylase, which is produced by humans and other animals to break down starch.

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Differences in numbers of vertebrae are most extreme in mammals which do not rely on running and leaping, such as those adapted to suspensory locomotion like apes and sloths, a team of anthropologists has concluded.

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Micro-CT scanning of a tiny snake-like fossil discovered in Scotland has shed new light on the elusive creature,

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A study led by Indiana University researchers reports the first evidence of bacteria stealing genetic material from their own worst enemy, bacteriophages, and transforming it to survive.

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Research by UChicago paleontologists finds that it is unlikely that a two-million-year-old, apelike fossil from South Africa is a direct ancestor of Homo, the genus to which modern-day humans belong.

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A new University of Michigan study provides the first evidence of transitive inference, the ability to use known relationships to infer unknown relationships, in a nonvertebrate animal: the lowly paper wasp.

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Tree and shrub genetics can be used to produce more accurate predictions of when leaves will burst bud in the spring, according to a Canada-US study.

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Tyrannosauroid dinosaurs have a long evolutionary history and include iconic giants like Tyrannosaurus rex. Now an international research team including Alan H. Turner, PhD, from Stony Brook University, have uncovered the skeleton of a small tyrannosaur from Late Cretaceous rocks in New Mexico.

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Scientists at The Ohio State University have discovered a new species that lived more than 500 million years ago—a form of ancient echinoderm that was ancestral to modern-day groups such as sea cucumbers, sea urchins, sea stars, brittle stars and crinoids. The fossil shows a crucial evolutionary step by echinoderms that parallels the most important ecological change to have taken place in marine sediments. The discovery, nearly 30 years in the making, was published recently in the Bulletin of Geosciences.

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The duck-billed hadrosaurs walked the Earth over 90-million years ago and were one of the most successful groups of dinosaurs.

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In a paper published May 2 in Nature Communications, a University of Washington team reports that two major forces have shaped bat skulls over their evolutionary history -- echolocation and diet -- generating a huge diversity of skull shapes across more than 1,300 bat species today.

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Superheroes like Thor and Black Widow may have what it takes to save the world in movies like Avengers: Endgame, but neither of their comic book depictions has a healthy body mass index (BMI). New research from Binghamton University and SUNY Oswego found that, within the pages of comic books, male superheroes are on average obese, while females are on average close to underweight.