It's not a coincidence that dogs are cuter than wolves, or that goats at a petting zoo have shorter horns and friendlier demeanors than their wild ancestors.
Mammals and birds today are warm-blooded, and this is often taken as the reason for their great success.
Dr Adriano R. Lameira, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick, has been awarded a prestigious UKRI Future Leader Fellowship, for his project: The ape and the first word: Understanding the origins and evolution of the first linguistic structures in the human clade through comparative research.
Pioneering analysis of 200 million-year-old teeth belonging to the earliest mammals suggests they functioned like their cold-blooded counterparts - reptiles, leading less active but much longer lives.
Three fossils found in a lignite mine in southeastern Yunan Province, China, are about 6.4 million years old, indicate monkeys existed in Asia at the same time as apes, and are probably the ancestors of some of the modern monkeys in the area, according to an international team of researchers.
Though some believe prehistoric humans lived in harmony with nature, a new analysis of fossils shows human arrival in the Bahamas caused some birds to be lost from the islands and other species to be completely wiped out.
Since first appearing in late 2019, the novel virus, SARS-CoV-2, has had a range of impacts on those it infects.
If you have been surrounded by the sight and smell of pine trees, you may have taken a closer look at the needles and then wondered how their properties are influenced by rainfall. In Physics of Fluids, researchers are currently probing how well pine needles allay the impact of rain beneath the tree. They explored the impact of raindrops onto fixed, noncircular fibers of the longleaf pine by using high-speed videography to capture the results.
Ecology is traditionally a data-poor discipline, but tiny microbial worlds offer the quantity of data needed to solve universal questions about abundance and diversity. New research in Nature Communications reveals the fundamental relationship between the environment and the species present in a microbial community and can be used as a starting point for investigating bigger systems.
Close bonds with the opposite sex can have non-romantic benefits. And not just for people, but for our primate cousins, too.
A milk-tooth found in the vicinity of "Riparo del Broion" on the Berici Hills in the Veneto region bears evidence of one of the last Neanderthals in Italy.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B from researchers at the University of Chicago and Universidade Federal do Pará explores regenerative ability in the tails of West African lungfish for the first time, and finds that the process shares many of the same traits as tail regeneration in salamanders. Their results indicate that this trait was likely found in a common ancestor – and provide a new opportunity for better understanding and harnessing the mechanisms of limb regrowth.
An over a century-long mystery has been surrounding the Taiwanese butterfly fauna ever since the "father of zoogeography" Alfred Russel Wallace, in collaboration with Frederic Moore, authored a landmark paper in 1866: the first to study the lepidopterans of the island.
Around 100,000 years ago, the climate worsened abruptly and the environment of Central-Eastern Europe shifted from forested to open steppe/taiga habitat, promoting the dispersal of wooly mammoth, wooly rhino and other cold adapted species from the Arctic.
New research from an international team of evolutionary geneticists, bioinformaticians and paleontologists suggests that dramatic environmental changes accompanying the shift or melting of continental glaciers played a key role as American mastodons moved north from their southern ranges.
Scientists report evidence of a hibernation-like state in Lystrosaurus, an animal that lived in Antarctica during the Early Triassic 250 million years ago. The fossils are the oldest evidence of a hibernation-like state in a vertebrate, and indicate that torpor arose in vertebrates even before mammals and dinosaurs evolved.
A new scientific study has revealed unique life strategies of two major groups of microbes that live below Earth's surface.
If you could dive down to the ocean floor nearly 540 million years ago just past the point where waves begin to break, you would find an explosion of life--scores of worm-like animals and other sea creatures tunneling complex holes and structures in the mud and sand--where before the environment had been mostly barren.
"I'm fascinated with life, and that's why I want to break it."
Two groups of nerve cells may serve as “on-off switches” for male mating and aggression, suggests a new study in rodents.
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