Researchers in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis are challenging the notion that environment drives the evolution of brain size. A new study was released Sept. 25 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
The brain plays an active and essential role much earlier than previously thought, according to new research from Tufts University scientists which shows that long before movement or other behaviors occur, the brain of an embryonic frog influences muscle and nerve development and protects the embryo from agents that cause developmental defects. Remarkably, the brain performs these functions while it is itself still developing, marking the earliest known events of the brain-body interface. In addition to identifying these essential instructive functions for the first time, the Tufts researchers successfully rescued defects caused by lack of a brain by using widely available, human-approved drugs.
Human activities could change the pace of evolution, similar to what occurred 66 million years ago when a giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving modern birds as their only descendants. That's one conclusion drawn by the authors of a new study published in Systematic Biology.
Some big plant-eating dinosaurs roaming present-day Utah some 75 million years ago were slurping up crustaceans on the side, a behavior that may have been tied to reproductive activities, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.
In an effort to settle the debate about the origin of dog domestication, a technique that uses 3-D scans of fossils is helping researchers determine the difference between dogs and wolves.
Dr. Igor Ulitsky has found that ancient genes that lost their ability to make proteins were “recycled,” surviving across millennia – and species – by evolving to produce a type of RNA that regulates major biological processes. His findings could lead to treatments for a number of genetic diseases.
ho knew that it’s possible to predict the fragrance of a flower by looking at its color? This is true for many of the 41 insect-pollinated plant species growing in a Phrygana scrubland habitat on the Greek island of Lesbos. An international research team published their findings Sept. 4 in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Out of hundreds of species of fruit flies, a handful can eat toxic mushrooms, and understanding why and how they pull this off could answer broader questions about evolution and adaptation.
Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and collaborators discovered a new kind of glycan (sugar chain) that survives even in a 4 million-year-old animal fossil from Kenya, under conditions where ancient DNA does not. While ancient hominin fossils are not yet available for glycan analysis, this proof-of-concept study, published September 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sets the stage for unprecedented explorations of human origins and diet.
How did the gut, the skin and musculature evolve? This question concerns scientists for more than a century. Through the investigation of the embryonic development of sea anemones, a very old animal lineage, researchers from the University of Vienna have now come to conclusions which challenge the 150 year-old hypothesis of the homology (common evolutionary origin) of the germ layers that form all later organs and tissues.
A recurring theme in nature documentaries is that of choosy females selecting brightly colored males. A new study shows that, in monogamous mating systems, male birds may select their lifelong mates in much the same way.
How proteins evolved billions of years ago, when Earth was devoid of life, has stumped many a scientist. A little do-si-do between amino acids and their chemical lookalikes may have done the trick. Evolutionary chemists tried it, and got results by the boatload.
A team of biologists has found an unexpected source for the brain’s development, a finding that offers new insights into the building of the nervous system.
The fossilized plesiosaur Sankar Chatterjee found in 1984 is giving scientists a new understanding of convergent evolution between reptiles and mammals.
New research argues that what we think we know about apes’ social intelligence is based on wishful thinking and flawed science.
A Johns Hopkins paleontologist and her collaborative team of scientists report they have clear evidence that the arrival of humans and subsequent human activity throughout the islands of the Caribbean were likely the primary causes of the extinction of native mammal species there. The evidence, they say, highlights the need for urgent human intervention to protect the native mammal species still inhabiting the region.
Epigenetics may explain how Darwin’s finches respond to rapid environmental changes.
A research team from Stony Brook University and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed a computational model explaining how certain molecules fold and bind together to grow and evolve from chemistry to biology.
Evolution has weeded out genetic variants associated with diseases for millennia and propagated genetic variants that protect against ailments, a comparative genetics study shows. But that good trend may have recently gone in reverse.
The study analyzed multiple species of Inga, a genus of tropical trees that produces defensive chemicals, and their various insect herbivores. The researchers found that closely-related plants evolved very different defensive traits. Additionally, their analysis revealed that herbivores may drive evolution of plant defenses, but may not show coevolutionary adaptations. Instead, they may ‘chase’ plants based on the herbivore’s own traits at the time they encounter a new host.
Researchers using Los Alamos’ unique neutron-imaging and high-energy X-ray capabilities have exposed the inner structures of the fossil skull of a 74-million-year-old tyrannosauroid dinosaur nicknamed the Bisti Beast in the highest-resolution scan of tyrannosaur skull ever done.
A 13-million-year-old infant ape skull – the oldest known fossil of its kind – is a new species that enhances knowledge of ape and human evolution, according to a study by an international team of scientists, including Craig S. Feibel at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Small, seemingly insignificant mutations in fruit flies may actually hold clues as to how a species will evolve tens of millions of years in the future.
Radiocarbon dating of a fossilized leg bone from a Jamaican monkey called Xenothrix mcgregori suggests it may be the one of the most recent primate species anywhere in the world to become extinct, and it may solve a long-standing mystery about the cause of its demise. The short answer: human settlement of its island home.
A U-led team developed a method for analyzing DNA sequence data to reconstruct early history of archaic human populations, revealing an evolutionary story that contradicts conventional wisdom about modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. The Neanderthal-Denisovan lineage nearly went extinct after separating from modern humans. Just 300 generations later, Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged around 744,000 years ago. The global Neanderthal population grew to tens of thousands of individuals living in fragmented, isolated populations.
In the last 20 years, the field of animal coloration research has experienced explosive growth thanks to numerous technological advances, and it now stands on the threshold of a new era.
An Australian trapdoor spider, which usually moves no further than a couple of metres from where it was hatched, must have travelled to Australia over the Indian Ocean from South Africa, University of Adelaide research has shown.
Flowering plants with at least 300,000 species are by far the most diverse group of plants on Earth. They include almost all the species used by people for food, medicine, and many other purposes. However, flowering plants arose only about 140 million years ago, quite late in the evolution of plants, toward the end of the age of the dinosaurs, but since then have diversified spectacularly. No one knows exactly how this happened, and the origin and early evolution of flowering plants and especially their flowers still remains one of the biggest enigmas in biology, almost 140 years after Charles Darwin called their rapid rise in the Cretaceous "an abominable mystery". A new study, coordinated by Juerg Schoenenberger from the University of Vienna and Hervé Sauquet of the Université Paris-Sud and published in "Nature Communications" reconstructs the evolution of flowers and sheds new light on what the earliest flowers might have looked like.
Writing today in the journal Cancer Research, James DeGregori, PhD, deputy director of the University of Colorado Cancer Center offers evidence that it is forces of evolution driven by natural selection acting in the ecosystem of the body that, in the presence of tissue damage, allow cells with dangerous mutations to thrive.
In saliva, scientists have found hints that a “ghost” species of archaic humans may have contributed genetic material to ancestors of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa today. The research adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that sexual rendezvous between different archaic human species may not have been unusual.
A team of researchers, including a faculty member and seven students from the University of Washington, has found and dated artifacts in northern Australia that indicate humans arrived there about 65,000 years ago — more than 10,000 years earlier than previously thought.
By analyzing the DNA of two prehistoric dogs from Germany, an international research team led by Krishna R. Veeramah, PhD, Assistant Professor of Ecology & Evolution in the College of Arts & Sciences at Stony Brook University, has determined that their genomes were the probable ancestors of modern European dogs. The finding, to be published in Nature Communications, suggests a single domestication event of modern dogs from a population of gray wolves that occurred between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago.
A Kansas State University study has found that male and female live-bearing fish evolve differently: Female evolution is influenced more strongly by natural selection, while male evolution is influenced more strongly by sexual selection.
Amphibians can develop tolerance to pesticides, but this tolerance can lead to increased susceptibility to parasites, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.
New biological information gleaned from the red vizcacha rat, a native species of Argentina, demonstrates how genomes can rapidly change in size. Researchers from McMaster University set out to study this particular species because its genome, or its complete set of DNA, is the largest of all mammals, and appears to have increased in size very rapidly.
Many attempts to explain how past people experienced their wider world have focused on sight at the expense of sound, but researchers from the University at Albany and the University at Buffalo have developed a tool that puts sound back into the ancient landscape.
Little is known about the origin and early evolution of the Notosuchia, hitherto unknown in the Jurassic period. New research on fossils from Madagascar, published in the peer-reviewed journal PeerJ by Italian and French paleontologists, begin to fill the gap in a million-year-long ghost lineage.
How baleen whales became filter feeders is widely debated among scientists—but now anatomy researchers at NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine may finally solve this mystery.
In 2014, during a visit to a remote part of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, ornithologist Dr. Miguel A. Gómez Garza came across parrots with a completely different colour pattern from other known species. A study published today in the open-access journal PeerJ names these birds as a new species.
It's easy to make up a story to explain an evolved trait; proving that's what happened is much harder. Here scientists test ideas about cooperative breeding in birds and find a solution that resolves earlier disagreements.
A UI study shows that a unique all-female lineage of salamander equally balances genes from the males of three other salamander species. The findings highlight the bizarre ways some animals reproduce in order to preserve their species. The results were published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.
In 1859, Charles Darwin included a novel tree of life in his trailblazing book on the theory of evolution, On the Origin of Species. Now, scientists from Rutgers University-New Brunswick and their collaborators want to reshape Darwin’s tree.
An international research team has uncovered 300,000 year-old fossil bones of Homo sapiens, a find that represents the oldest reliably dated fossil evidence of our species.
A new study published May 30 in the Journal of Mammalogy describes a newly discovered third species of flying squirrel in North America — now known as Humboldt's flying squirrel. It inhabits the Pacific Coast region of North America, from southern British Columbia to the mountains of southern California.
The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry is the densest collection of Jurassic dinosaur fossils. Since its discovery in the 1920s, numerous hypotheses have been proposed to explain the origin of the quarry. Were the dinosaurs poisoned? Did they die due to drought? Were they trapped in quick sand? A new study suggests that the quarry represents numerous mortality events which brought the dinosaurs to the site over time, rather than a single fatal event.
UCLA scientists discovered that changes to the genes that shortened the Galapagos cormorant's wings are the same genes that go awry in a group of human bone disorders characterized by stunted arms and legs. The findings shed light on the genetic mechanisms underlying the evolution of limb size and could eventually lead to new treatments for people with skeletal ciliopathies.
Scientists at Georgia State University have rewired the neural circuit of one species and given it the connections of another species to test a hypothesis about the evolution of neural circuits and behavior.
About 1 to 2 million years ago, early humans in East Africa periodically faced very dry conditions, with little or no water in sight. But they likely had access to hundreds of springs that lingered despite long dry spells, allowing our ancestors to head north and out of Africa, according to a groundbreaking study by scientists at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and other institutions. The international team showed that climate may not play such a primary role in human evolution as is commonly asserted.
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