Biologists have always been fascinated by the diversity and changeability of life on Earth and have attempted to answer a fundamental question: How do new species originate?
Scientists are now confident animal life on solid ground started with a few short bursts of marine creatures making the leap from the oceans. New research at the University of Portsmouth also paints a clear picture of how animals rapidly spread out and changed once they made the leap.
A-tisket, A-tasket. You can tell a lot from a basket. Especially if it’s from ancient ruins of a civilization inhabited by humans 15,000 years ago. An archaeologist is among the team that made a groundbreaking discovery in coastal Peru – home to one of the earliest pyramids in South America. Thousands of artifacts, including elaborate hand-woven baskets, show that early humans in that region were a lot more advanced than originally thought and had very complex social networks.
Analysis of a 3.3 million-year-old fossil skeleton reveals the most complete spinal column of any early human relative, including vertebrae, neck and rib cage. The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that portions of the human spinal structure that enable efficient walking motions were established millions of years earlier than previously thought.
By analyzing both the genes that control color detecting photoreceptors and the structural components of the eye itself, University of California, Irvine evolutionary biologists have discovered male and female butterflies of one particular species have the unique ability to see the world differently from each another because of sex-related evolutionary traits.
Biomarkers in the teeth of wild orangutans indicate nursing patterns related to food fluctuations in their habitats, which can help guide understanding of breast-feeding evolution in humans, according to a study published today in Science Advances.
A Florida State- Oklahoma State research team found that T. rex could pulverize bones, chomping down with nearly 8,000 pounds of force.
Newly published research from ISU scientists shows many species may not be as susceptible to coextinction events as once thought. This new understanding hinges on how dependent individual species are on their mutualist relationships.
Which came first, overall bigger brains or larger brain regions that control specialized behaviors? Neuroscientists have debated this question for decades, but a new Cornell University study settles the score.
A new bioinformatics tool to compare genome data has been developed by teams from the Max F. Perutz Laboratories, a joint venture of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna, together with researchers from Australia and Canada. The program called “ModelFinder” uses a fast algorithm and allows previously not attainable new insights into evolution. The results are published in the influential journal Nature Methods.
Probing deeper into the South African cave system known as Rising Star, which last year yielded the largest cache of hominin fossils known to science, an international team of researchers has discovered another chamber with more remains of a newfound human relative, Homo naledi. The discovery of the new fossils representing the remains of at least three juvenile and adult specimens includes a “wonderfully complete skull,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks.
A team of researchers has uncovered partial skeletons of Homo naledi, a recently discovered human relative—a finding that offers new insights into this species and human evolution generally.
Scientists have identified a “princess pheromone” that tells an ant colony when a larva is preparing to become a queen.
The scientist who ventures away from her original research interest is far rarer than those who stay in familiar territory, according to new research in the emerging field of “the science of research science” published in Nature Human Behavior.
Researchers recently confirmed it is possible to extract proteins from 80-million-year-old dinosaur bones. The discovery sparks hopes for new insights about evolution and environmental change and could even offer useful clues for drug discovery or the search for extraterrestrial life.
In a new synthesis of anatomy research, scientists showcase the surprising, record-breaking and just plain weird adaptations of the star-nosed mole. The animal eats faster and sports a more sensitive touch organ than any other mammal, is the first mammal known to smell underwater and offers fascinating insights about the brain-body interface.
The dawn of the Animal Kingdom began with a collagen scaffold that enabled the organization of cells into tissues.
Studies of bones from Ice Age megafaunal animals across Eurasia and the Americas have revealed that major increases in environmental moisture occurred just before many species suddenly became extinct around 11-15,000 years ago. The persistent moisture resulting from melting permafrost and glaciers caused widespread glacial-age grasslands to be rapidly replaced by peatlands and bogs, fragmenting populations of large herbivore grazers.
New research by Adam Anderson, professor of human development at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology, reveals why the eyes offer a window into the soul. According to the recent study, in Psychological Science, we interpret a person’s emotions by analyzing the expression in their eyes – a process that began as a universal reaction to environmental stimuli and evolved to communicate our deepest emotions.
Why do animals that live in caves become blind? Charles Darwin originally suggested that eyes could be lost by “disuse” over time. Now, Reed Cartwright, an ASU evolutionary biologist in the School of Life Sciences and researcher at the Biodesign Institute, wants to get to the heart of the matter—and in a recent publication in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, may be proving Darwin wrong.
A new species of ancient reptile has been described by scientists at the University of Birmingham, filling a critical gap in the fossil record of dinosaur cousins and suggesting that some features thought to characterise dinosaurs evolved much earlier than previously thought.
A Virginia Tech paleobiologist's latest discovery of Teleocrater rhadinus has overturned popular predictions.
The sensory system in fish fins evolves in parallel to fin shape and mechanics, and is specifically tuned to work with the fish’s swimming behavior, according to new research from the University of Chicago. The researchers found these parallels across a wide range of fish species, suggesting that it may occur in other animals as well.
One of the longest-running controversies in evolutionary biology has been, “What was the oldest branch of the animal family tree?” Was it the sponges, as had long been thought, or was it the delicate marine predators called comb jellies? A powerful new method has been devised to settle contentious phylogenetic tree-of-life issues like this and it comes down squarely on the side of comb jellies.
A new study of Peruvian frogs living at a wide variety of elevations—from the Amazon floodplain to high Andes peaks—lends support to the idea that lowland amphibians are at higher risk from future climate warming.
Viruses outnumber the microbes on Earth. A handful of giant viruses have been discovered in the past two decades. In Science, DOE Joint Genome Institute scientists report discovering a novel group of giant viruses that they believe significantly increases our understanding of viral evolution.
Researchers from the University of Missouri School Of Medicine recently discovered that although alligators, birds and dinosaurs have a similar skull-joint shape, this does not guarantee that their movements are the same.
Long before the advent of agriculture, hunter-gatherers began putting down roots in the Middle East, building more permanent homes and altering the ecological balance in ways that allowed the common house mouse to flourish, new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates.Findings suggest the roots of animal domestication go back to human sedentism thousands of years prior to what has long been considered the dawn of agriculture.
Brain size in primates is predicted by diet, an analysis by a team of New York University anthropologists indicates. These results call into question “the social brain hypothesis,” which has posited that humans and other primates are big-brained due to factors pertaining to sociality.
Harry Greene, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University, and Cissy Ballen of the University of Minnesota have just published a paper in PLOS Biology, “Walking and Talking the Tree of Life: Why and How to Teach About Biodiversity,” discussing why the evolutionary TOL approach to biodiversity is best, to what extent the traditional taxonomy is still used and how to teach TOL using an active learning approach.
The evolution of bipedalism in fossil humans can be detected using a key feature of the skull — a claim that was previously contested but now has been further validated by researchers at Stony Brook University and The University of Texas at Austin.
PHILADELPHIA – Adolescence marks not only the period of physical maturation bridging childhood and adulthood, but also a crucial period for remodeling of the human brain. A Penn study reveals new patterns of coordinated development in the outer layer of the cerebrum of the human brain and describes how these structural patterns relate to functional networks.
More than 50 million years ago, when the Earth experienced a series of extreme global warming events, early mammals responded by shrinking in size. While this mammalian dwarfism has previously been linked to the largest of these events, research led by the University of New Hampshire has found that this evolutionary process can happen in smaller, so-called hyperthermals, indicating an important pattern that could help shape an understanding of underlying effects of current human-caused climate change.
A research team reports that fully grown Galapagos penguins who have fledged -- or left the nest -- continue to beg their parents for food. And sometimes, probably when the bounty of the sea is plentiful, parents oblige and feed their adult offspring.
A large international research team, directed by the Portuguese archaeologist João Zilhão and including Binghamton University anthropologist Rolf Quam, has found the oldest fossil human cranium in Portugal, marking an important contribution to knowledge of human evolution during the middle Pleistocene in Europe and to the origin of the Neandertals.
DNA in hair samples collected from Aboriginal people across Australia in the early to mid-1900s has revealed that populations have been continuously present in the same regions for up to 50,000 years – soon after the peopling of Australia.
A Northwestern University and W.M. Keck Science Department of Pitzer, Claremont McKenna and Scripps colleges study suggests it was the power of the eyes and not the limbs that first led our aquatic ancestors to make the leap from water to land. The researchers discovered that eyes nearly tripled in size before -- not after -- the water-to-land transition. Crocodile-like animals saw easy meals on land and then evolved limbs that enabled them to get there, the researchers argue.
Global and local climate conditions predict variation in natural selection across diverse plant and animal populations
Birds exhibit an astonishing variety of nest designs, and in no group is this variety more striking than in the passerines.
A study by scientists at Indiana University has found that the master gene that regulates differences between males and females plays a complex role in matching the right physical trait to the right sex. The research, published Feb. 27 in the journal Nature Communications, reveals new details about the behavior of the gene called "doublesex," or dsx.
The findings published Wednesday (Feb. 22, 2017) in the journal Science Advances suggest that Paleoamericans share a last common ancestor with modern native South Americans outside, rather than inside, the Americas and underscore the importance of looking at both genetic and morphological evidence, each revealing different aspects of the human story, to help unravel our species’ history.
We all do it; we all need it – humans and animals alike. Neuroscientists have been studying Mexican cavefish to provide insight into the evolutionary mechanisms regulating sleep loss and the relationship between sensory processing and sleep.
Disgust is an emotion that's been co-opted to discriminate against people and things which pose no danger, holding humans back in social and evolutionary terms
Genomic study in lower Congo reveals microscale diversification.
A new WCS study in India shows that three carnivores – tigers, leopards, and dholes (Asian wild dog) – seemingly in direct competition with one other, are living side by side with surprisingly little conflict.
Walking on our heels, a feature that separates great apes, including humans, from other primates, confers advantages in fighting, according to a new University of Utah study published today in Biology Open. Although moving from the balls of the feet is important for quickness, standing with heels planted allows more swinging force, according to study lead author and biologist David Carrier, suggesting that aggression may have played a part in shaping our stance.
Biological invasions pose major threats to biodiversity, but little is known about how evolution might alter their impacts over time. Now, Rutgers University scientists have performed the first study of how evolution unfolds after invasions change native systems. The experimental invasions – elaborate experiments designed by doctoral student Cara A. Faillace and her adviser, Professor Peter J. Morin – took place in glass jars suitable for savory jam or jelly, with thousands of microscopic organisms on each side.
An investigation into the evolution of human walking by looking at how chimpanzees walk on two legs is the subject of a new research paper published in Journal of Human Evolution.
Nature requires the right mix of biological ingredients to make a good scavenger.
A research team led by Mathematician Tatsuya Sasaki from the University of Vienna presents a new optimal theory of the evolution of reputation-based cooperation. This team proves that the practice of making moral assessments conditionally is very effective in establishing cooperation in terms of evolutionary game theory. "Our study also demonstrates the evolutionary disadvantage of seeking reputation by sanctioning wrongdoers," says Sasaki. The results of the study were published on the in Scientific Reports.
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