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.