A new study has shown that humans may have evolved a spring-like arch to help us walk on two feet. Researchers studying the evolution of bipedal walking have long assumed that the raised arch of the foot helps us walk by acting as a lever which propels the body forward.
A study published by MBARI researchers and their collaborators today in Nature provides new insights about one of the earliest points in animal evolution that happened more than 700 million years ago.
An international collaboration that includes scientists from the University of Colorado School of Medicine has uncovered new clues about the origin of paired appendages – a major evolutionary step that remains unresolved and highly debated.
Spiny mice in the genus Acomys look much like more familiar house mice in the genus Mus, although their coats do have stiff guard hairs that give them their name.
If you look at enough dinosaur fossils, you'll see that their skulls sport an amazing variety of bony ornaments, ranging from the horns of Triceratops and the mohawk-like crests of hadrosaurs to the bumps and knobs covering the head of Tyrannosaurus rex.
When someone near you turns their head towards something in the environment, you likely can’t help to follow their gaze direction. This reaction is observed in mammals, birds and even reptiles alike.
One of the world’s largest fundamentalist Christian education groups is teaching its students climate change denial as fact, and still presents the theory of evolution as an ‘absurd and discredited’ conspiracy theory, finds a report by UCL researchers.
Stony Brook University will honor the life and legacy of eminent paleoanthropologist, conservationist and politician Richard E. Leakey by hosting “Africa: The Human Cradle: An International Conference Paying Tribute to Richard E. Leakey” from June 5 - 9, 2023 at the university’s Charles B. Wang Center. The Turkana Basin Institute (TBI) and Stony Brook are hosting the conference, in partnership with the National Geographic Society. Thought leaders from around the world will celebrate the immeasurable, life-long contributions by Leakey to furthering the appreciation of Africa’s centrality in the narrative of human evolution.
Biologists from Washington University in St. Louis collaborated with a large number of butterfly and plant specialists to reconstruct the origin and global spread of butterflies. Working with researchers from dozens of countries, Michael Landis and Mariana P. Braga in Arts & Sciences helped create the world’s largest butterfly tree of life, assembled with DNA from more than 2,000 species representing all butterfly families.
Scientists have discovered a new species of mosasaur, a sea-dwelling lizard from the age of the dinosaurs, with strange, ridged teeth unlike those of any known reptile.
Two researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have discovered how to permanently transform the scales that normally cover the feet of chickens into feathers, by specificially modifying the expression of certain genes.
An international research team led by Faviel A. López-Romero of the University of Vienna investigated how the jaw shape of sharks has changed over the course of evolution. Their conclusion: in the most widespread shark species, the jaws show relatively little variation in shape over millions of years; most variable jaws were found for deep-sea sharks. The results of this study were published in the journal Communications Biology.
Over 500 scientists, philosophers, scholars, artists will gather in Taormina Sicily and engage in discussions to try to get as close as possible to the question regarding the nature of consciousness.
Over 3,000 generations of laboratory evolution, Georgia Tech researchers watched as their model organism, “snowflake yeast,” began to adapt as multicellular individuals. In new research, the team shows how snowflake yeast evolved to be physically stronger and more than 20,000 times larger than their ancestor. Their study is the first major report on the ongoing Multicellularity Long-Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE), which the team hopes to run for decades.
Scientists from Tokyo Metropolitan University have proposed a hypothesis for why insects are so rare in marine environments.
Humans inherited genetic material from Neanderthals that affects the shape of our noses, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.
Researchers have proposed a new model for the evolution of higher brain functions and behaviors in the Hymenoptera order of insects.
Similar to humans, chimpanzees combine vocalizations into larger communicatively meaningful structures. UZH researchers suggest that this ability might be evolutionarily more ancient than previously thought.
Cycads, a group of gymnosperms which can resemble miniature palm trees (like the popular sago palm houseplant) were long thought to be “living fossils,” a group that had evolved minimally since the time of the dinosaurs. Now, a well-preserved 80-million-year-old pollen cone discovered in California has rewritten scientific understanding of the plants.
Innovating, i.e. the ability to find solutions to new problems or innovative solutions to known problems, it provides crucial benefits for the adaptation and the survival of human beings as well as for animals.
A scientific project that compares the genomes of 240 living species of mammals has identified transposable elements (TEs) – genes that can change their position within a genome, creating or reversing mutations and thus altering a cell’s genetic identity – as a crucial area of study to help uncover the evolutionary process of mammals and to better understand biodiversity.
Science educators in India are urging the government to restore material on Darwinian evolution which has been removed from science textbooks on the grounds that the study load on schoolchildren needs to be lightened after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Research shows which regions have important functions in mammals, which genetic changes have led to specific characteristics in different species and which mutations can cause
More than a dozen scientists from multiple disciplines across the university collaborated on the Zoonomia Project.
Even though it is important to know where these variations are located in the genome, it's also useful to know how or why these genetic variations happened in the first place. Sullivan hopes that other researchers will make use of the new and extensive document to reach their own conclusions regarding the genetics underlying a variety of human diseases.
Global space for Asian elephant habitats has been in rapid decline since the 1700s, a new report reveals. More than 3 million square kilometers of the Asian elephant’s historic habitat range has been lost in just three centuries and may underlie present-day conflicts between elephants and people.
A fossil of a ‘royal fish’ - estimated to be over 66 million years old - is the first ever to be found in Africa.
Knowing how cultural evolution happens also means we can harness it for the larger good, creating a more just and sustainable world, according to a new article from a research team including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
A team of international researchers led by Federico Baltar of the University of Vienna and José M González of the University of La Laguna has identified a previously unknown group of bacteria, called UBA868, as key players in the energy cycle of the deep ocean. They are significantly involved in the biogeochemical cycle in the marine layer between 200 and 1000 meters. The results have now been published in the journal Nature Microbiology.
Blinking is crucial for the eye. It’s how animals clean their eyes, protect them, and even communicate. But how and why did blinking originate? Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Seton Hill University, and Pennsylvania State University studied the mudskipper, an amphibious fish that spends most of its day on land, to better understand why blinking is a fundamental behavior for life on land.
Researchers conducted the first ever systematic and comprehensive study of Mountain Quail habitat associations and fire ecology in the Sierra Nevada.
By studying green algae in Swedish lakes, a research team, led by Lund University in Sweden, has succeeded in identifying which environmental conditions promote multicellularity.
Researcher will discuss the study which involved a sleeping aid known as suvorexant that is already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for insomnia, hints at the potential of sleep medications to slow or stop the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
Stony Brook University graduate student Fanny M. Cornejo has been named the winner of the newly-created “Emerging Conservationist Award" presented by the Indianapolis Prize. This award recognizes professional wildlife conservationists, biologists and scientists under 40-years of age who are working to make strides in saving animal species from extinction. Cornejo was selected from among 10 finalists and will receive $50,000 provided by the Kobe Foundation to continue Yunkawasi’s conservation work.
The diverse swimming techniques of the ancient reptiles that ruled the Mesozoic seas have been revealed for the first time by scientists at the University of Bristol.
New fossils in amber have revealed that beetles fed on the feathers of dinosaurs about 105 million years ago, showing a symbiotic relationship of one-sided or mutual benefit.
Research led by UC San Diego and Harvard has traced the evolutionary adaptations of octopus and squid sensing capabilities. The researchers describe for the first time the structure of an octopus chemotactile receptor, which octopus arms use for taste-by-touch exploration of the seafloor.
Using rigorous and detailed collection methods, a University of Minnesota Twin Cities-led research team was able to place the remains of fossil apes, such as Morotopithecus, within detailed habitat reconstructions.
Scientists have traced the origin of a unique protein key to vertebrate’s camera-like vision back 500 million years. Their analysis of more than 900 genomes across the tree of life revealed that the protein came through horizontal gene transfer from foreign bacterial genes.
Scientists have described a new species of bat based on the oldest bat skeletons ever recovered. The study on the extinct bat, which lived in Wyoming about 52 million years ago, supports the idea that bats diversified rapidly on multiple continents during this time.
A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, published by Oxford University Press, provides interesting new evidence about the evolution of North American wolves, which has been a subject of debate among conservationists and taxonomists.
Below are some of the latest headlines in the new Avian Flu channel on Newswise.
Many birds’ feathers are remarkably efficient at shedding water — so much so that “like water off a duck’s back” is a common expression.
Proteins are components of every cell. How they have changed in the course of evolution for the purpose of taking on new functions in the body, has long been a subject of research.
The ancestors of modern mammals managed to evolve into one of the most successful animal lineages – the key was to start out small and simple, a new study reveals.
How and where life began 3.5 billion years ago is still a mystery, but there are two things of which scientists are almost certain. First, for much of that time, life on Earth was almost exclusively microbial. Second, there must have been prebiotic precursor compounds such as amino acids, organic acids, and lipids available to jumpstart the formation of DNA, enzymes, and cell walls, and to set life on a path leading to the complex forms we see today.
Decades' worth of research has shown that the motivation to feed, i.e., hunger and feelings of fullness, is controlled by hormones and small proteins called neuropeptides.
A team of researchers compared the genomes of woolly mammoths with modern day elephants to find out what made woolly mammoths unique, both as individuals and as a species. The investigators report April 7 in the journal Current Biology that many of the woolly mammoth’s trademark features—including their woolly coats and large fat deposits—were already genetically encoded in the earliest woolly mammoths, but these and other traits became more defined over the species’ 700,000+ year existence.
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