Feature Channels: Evolution and Darwin

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Urbanization and human activities have transformed a significant proportion of the land on Earth, resulting in the formation of urban environments.

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Because the bumblebee that an orchid relies on for pollination does not exist on a remote island, the plant gets pollinated by an island wasp.

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Scientists from the University of Portsmouth examining the evolutionary roots of language say they’ve discovered chimp vocal development is not far off from humans.

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A new study led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, Brooklyn College, and the Catalan Institute of Paleontology Miquel Crusafont has reconstructed the well-preserved but damaged skull of a great ape species that lived about 12 million years ago.

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A paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today describes “a missing law of nature,” recognizing for the first time an important norm within the natural world’s workings.

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A new study suggests making a transition from “old school” genetics to “new school” genomics for species conservation purposes probably isn’t necessary in all cases.

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Adult insects, including butterflies and moths, typically have only three pairs of legs. But the existence of extra legs in caterpillars – chubby abdominal appendeages also known as ‘prolegs’ – has long posed an evolutionary mystery to biologists.

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Evolutionary biologists have for the first time decoded the genetic lineage of a famous killer whale and a pod that once worked alongside whale hunters off the coast of New South Wales.

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James Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, measured natural selection in four Anolis lizard species in the wild for five consecutive time periods over three years.

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Research from Washington University in St. Louis and the Georgia Institute of Technology provides a more complete explanation of how evolution plays out among species that live side-by-side.

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A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, published by Oxford University Press, for the first time provides a comprehensive set of genomic resources for pangolins, sometimes known as scaly anteaters, that researchers believe will be integral for protecting these threatened mammals.

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This asynchronous beating comes from how the flight muscles interact with the physics of the insect’s springy exoskeleton. This decoupling of neural commands and muscle contractions is common in only four distinct insect groups. For years, scientists assumed these four groups evolved these ultrafast wingbeats separately, but research from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) shows that they evolved from a single common ancestor. This discovery demonstrates evolution has repeatedly turned on and off this particular mode of flight. The researchers developed physics models and robotics to test how these transitions could occur.

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For the first time, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are being used to model hidden patterns in nature, not just for one bird species, but for entire ecological communities across continents. And the models follow each species’ full annual life cycle, from breeding to fall migration to nonbreeding grounds, and back north again during spring migration.

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Commercial whaling in the 20th century decimated populations of large whales but also appears to have had a lasting impact on the genetic diversity of today’s surviving whales, new research from Oregon State University shows.

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An international team of researchers has released a landmark study on contemporary evolutionary change in natural populations. Their study uses one of the largest genomic datasets ever produced for animals in their natural environment, comprising nearly 4,000 Darwin’s finches.

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A 455-million-year-old fossil fish provides a new perspective on how vertebrates evolved to protect their brains, a study has found.

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In a new study led by the laboratories of Prof. Prashant Sharma of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dr. Efrat Gavish-Regev of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a team of researchers has uncovering the mysteries surrounding camel spiders (Solifugae), by successfully establishing the first-ever comprehensive molecular tree (phylogeny) of this enigmatic arachnid order.

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University of Utah biologist Richard Clark has published research this month that sheds new light on how the two-spotted spider mite mite, known to science as Tetranychus urticae, quickly evolves resistance to foreign compounds, known as xenobiotics.

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A cave containing thousands of endangered Pacific Sheath-tailed bats has been discovered on Vanua Balavu, an island on the remote Lau archipelago in Fiji.

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A group of researchers have redescribed a unique fossil animal from rocks nearly 520 million years old that fills in a gap in our understanding of the evolution of animals known as arthropods.

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New research from Michigan State University suggests that natural selection, famous for rewarding advantageous differences in organisms, can also preserve similarities.

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A new study led by Archaeologist Michelle Bebber, Ph.D., an assistant professor in Kent State University’s Department of Anthropology, has demonstrated that the atlatl (i.e. spear thrower) functions as an “equalizer”, a finding which supports women’s potential active role as prehistoric hunters.

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The discovery that birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs of the Late Jurassic was made possible by recently discovered fossils of theropods such as Tyrannosaurus rex and the smaller velociraptors. In a way, you could say that dinosaurs are still with us and seen tweeting from your own backyard! Below are the latest research headlines in the Birds channel on Newswise.

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Scientists in South America and Australia have discovered that environmental stresses, such as large variations in rainfall and floods in the rivers, tend to change the mating rituals of these semi-aquatic Neotropical spiders which live in riparian habitats in Uruguay and Brazil.

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The apex predators that roamed the earth 230 million years ago had a much weaker bite than previously thought, and likely couldn’t crunch through bone to consume the entirety of their kills.

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In a new study, scientists Stewart Edie of the Smithsonian, Shan Huang of the University of Birmingham and colleagues drastically expanded the list of bivalve species, such as clams, oysters, mussels, scallops and their relatives, that humans are known to harvest and identified the traits that make these species prime targets for harvesting.

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Researchers led by a team at UT Southwestern Medical Center have identified cellular and molecular features of the brain that set modern humans apart from their closest primate relatives and ancient human ancestors. The findings, published in Nature, offer new insights into human brain evolution.

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New research shows that the hormone testosterone — which naturally triggers male electric fish to elongate the electric pulses they send out during the breeding season — also alters a system in the fish’s brain that enables the fish to ignore its own electric signals.

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An analysis of the hierarchy of tipping points suggests that during the last 66 million years two events set the scene for further climate tipping and for the evolution of the climate system in particular.

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The Persian Gold Tarantula (Chaetopelma persianum) is a newly described species recently discovered in northwestern Iran. In fact, the “woolly, golden hairs” the scientists observed and examined on a single specimen, were one of the features so unique that it was not necessary for additional individuals to be collected and physically studied.

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A remarkable new fossil from China reveals for the first time that a group of reptiles were already using whale-like filter feeding 250 million years ago.

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A new study by Tel Aviv University reveals that the presence of parasites in nature is not necessarily negative, and sometimes even helps animals survive.

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Scientists have worked out how one unusual species of trilobite — an ancient, sea-dwelling relative of spiders and lobsters — was able to defend itself against predators and survive a bumpy ride as Earth’s oxygen levels fluctuated.

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IU researcher Daniella Chusyd and her team are studying elephants' unique evolutionary strategies to better understand human aging — research which will also help better understand the impact human activities can have on elephant health and aging, while informing strategies and policies that allow humans and elephants to coexist.

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The brains of ultra-marathon runners taking part in gruelling long-distance races may hold clues about our evolutionary past, a new study has found.

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Researchers from the Hessian State Museum Darmstadt and the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center Frankfurt have uncovered the factors that determine the enormous diversity of herbivorous insects.

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Researchers have revealed the unique ‘cheating’ strategy a New Zealand insect has developed to avoid being eaten – mimicking a highly toxic species.

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The first bees evolved on an ancient supercontinent more than 120 million years ago, diversifying faster and spreading wider than previously suspected, a new study shows.

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An international research study led by the University of Vienna (Austria) and the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) in Barcelona (Spain), recently published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, provides a better insight into the evolutionary history of gorillas.

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Bees and wasps have converged on the same architectural solutions to nest-building problems, according to a study.