A new study is helping to rewrite Ebola’s family history. It shows that Ebola and Marburg are each members of ancient evolutionary lines, and that these two viruses last shared a common ancestor sometime prior to 16-23 million years ago.
Recent studies showed that the color red tends increase our attraction toward others, feelings of jealousy, and even reaction times. Now, new research shows that female monkeys also respond to the color red, suggesting that biology, rather than our culture, may play the fundamental role in our “red” reactions.
Parasitic bacteria were the first cousins of the mitochondria that power cells in animals and plants – and first acted as energy parasites in those cells before becoming beneficial, according to a new University of Virginia study.
More than 100 years since they were first discovered, some of the world's most bizarre fossils have been identified as distant relatives of humans, thanks to the work of University of Adelaide researchers.
Vladimir Dinets, a research assistant professor in UT's Department of Psychology, has found that crocodiles work as a team to hunt their prey. His research tapped into the power of social media to document such behavior.
College students’ views on evolution are shaped significantly more by religiosity than education, according to a survey of Southern students.
Skates have primitive colons. This may not sound like a big deal, but it is. The discovery could change scientific understanding of evolution, of how animals emerged from water to live on land.
Researchers have uncovered the first-ever field-based evidence for a biological mechanism called 'group selection' contributing to local adaptation in natural populations. Evolutionary theorists have been debating the existence and power of group selection for decades. Now two scientists have observed it in the wild -- as they report in the journal Nature.
Sequencing the genomes of monarch butterflies from around the world, scientists have made surprising insights into the insect’s genetics. They identified a single gene that appears central to migration – a behavior generally regarded as complex – and another that controls pigmentation, as well as shed light on the evolutionary origins of the monarch.
At the beginning of the age of dinosaurs, gigantic reptiles—distant relatives of modern crocodiles—ruled the earth. Some lived on land and others in water and it was thought they didn't much interact. But a tooth found by a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researcher in the thigh of one of these ancient animals is challenging this belief.
The study shows that the familiar anatomical features of birds – such as feathers, wings and wishbones – all first evolved piecemeal in their dinosaur ancestors over tens of millions of years. However, once a fully functioning bird body shape was complete, an evolutionary explosion began, causing a rapid increase in the rate at which birds evolved. This led eventually to the thousands of avian species that we know today.
New research, featured symposia and information on plenary sessions and workshops to be presented at the 2014 Comparative Approaches to Grand Challenges in Physiology meeting in San Diego. View the full meeting program at http://ow.ly/BEI2K.
Virginia Tech geobiologist Shuhai Xiao and collaborators from the Chinese Academy of Sciences shed new light on multicellular fossils from a time 60 million years before a vast growth spurt of life known as the Cambrian Explosion occurred on Earth.
A University of Utah study of Africa’s Kalahari Bushmen suggests that stories told over firelight helped human culture and thought evolve by reinforcing social traditions, promoting harmony and equality, and sparking the imagination to envision a broad sense of community, both with distant people and the spirit world.
Many native species have vanished from tropical islands because of human impact, but University of Florida scientists have discovered how fossils can be used to restore lost biodiversity.
The human response to unfairness evolved in order to support long-term cooperation, according to a research team from Georgia State University and Emory University.
Investigator and Scientific Director Robb Krumlauf, Ph.D. and colleagues show that the sea lamprey Petromyzon marinus, a survivor of ancient jawless vertebrates, exhibits a pattern of gene expression that is reminiscent of its jawed cousins, who evolved much, much later.
Scientists today unveiled what appears to be the first truly semiaquatic dinosaur, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus.
About 400 million years ago a group of fish began exploring land and evolved into tetrapods – today's amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. But just how these ancient fish used their fishy bodies and fins in a terrestrial environment and what evolutionary processes were at play remain scientific mysteries.
Novel ecosystems arise when human activities transform biological communities through species invasions and environmental change. They are seemingly ubiquitous, and thus many policymakers and ecologists argue for them to be accepted as the "new normal"—an idea the researchers say is a bad one.
By studying the genetic mechanisms that enable regeneration in our distant evolutionary cousins, scientists hope to one day uncover potentially latent healing abilities that may lie hidden in our own genome.
Scientists from the University of Chicago have developed a new method to reveal the ancestral ranges of New World birds, and discovered that bird migration in the Americas evolved in species that resided in North America. Their work also offers evidence that many tropical bird species descended from migratory ancestors that lost migration.
By tracing nearly 3,000 genes to the earliest common ancestor of butterflies and moths, University of Florida scientists have created an extensive “Tree of Lepidoptera” in the first study to use large-scale, next-generation DNA sequencing.
A new study led by an Australian scientist has revealed how massive, meat-eating, ground-dwelling dinosaurs − the theropods − evolved into agile flyers: they just kept shrinking and shrinking, for over 50 million years.
The latest work from a Kansas State University philosopher appears in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, which is a rarity for philosophy research.
Woodrats lost their ability to eat toxic creosote bushes after antibiotics killed their gut microbes. Woodrats that never ate the plants were able to do so after receiving fecal transplants with microbes from creosote-eaters, University of Utah biologists found.
A new study, involving roundworms, shows that starvation induces specific changes in so-called small RNAs and that these changes are inherited through at least three consecutive generations, apparently without any DNA involvement.
For close to 180 years, Charles Darwin’s library aboard HMS Beagle during his expedition around the world in the 1830s remained lost. The library was dispersed at the end of the voyage. Today, the library has been electronically re-constructed in its entirety and made freely available online.
If you consider your friends family, you may be on to something. A study from the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University finds that friends who are not biologically related still resemble each other genetically.
More than 140 years ago, Charles Darwin noticed something peculiar about domesticated mammals. Compared to their wild ancestors, domestic species are more tame, and they also tend to display a suite of other characteristic features, including floppier ears, patches of white fur, and more juvenile faces with smaller jaws. Since Darwin’s observations, the explanation for this pattern has proved elusive, but now, in a Perspectives article published in the journal GENETICS, a new hypothesis has been proposed that could explain why breeding for tameness causes changes in such diverse traits.
A chimpanzee’s intelligence is largely determined by its genes, while environmental factors may be less important than scientists previously thought, according to a Georgia State University research study.
Researchers led by scientists with the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute have discovered how fruit flies in "Evolution Canyon" have been able to adapt to extremely different, ecologies. The discovery adds to current understanding of the biodiversity.
Figuring out how to survive on a lean-season diet of hard-to-reach ants, slugs and other bugs may have spurred the development of bigger brains and higher-level cognitive functions in the ancestors of humans and other primates, suggests research from Washington University in St. Louis.
The evolution of the ribosome, a large molecular structure found in the cells of all species, has been revealed in unprecedented detail in a new study.
The popular idea that Northern Europeans developed light skin to absorb more UV light so they could make more vitamin D – vital for healthy bones and immune function – is questioned by UC San Francisco researchers in a new study published online in the journal Evolutionary Biology.
Humans have a well-documented tendency to see winning and losing streaks in situations that, in fact, are random. But scientists disagree about whether the “hot-hand bias” is a cultural artifact picked up in childhood or a predisposition deeply ingrained in the structure of our cognitive architecture.
Scientists have found how the electric fish evolved its jolt. Writing June 27, 2014 in the journal Science, a team of researchers led by Michael Sussman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Harold Zakon of the University of Texas at Austin and Manoj Samanta of the Systemix Institute in Redmond, Washington identifies the regulatory molecules involved in the genetic and developmental pathways that electric fish have used to convert a simple muscle into an organ capable of generating a potent electrical field.
Old World monkeys have undergone a remarkable evolution in facial appearance as a way of avoiding interbreeding with closely related and geographically proximate species, researchers from NYU and the University of Exeter have found. Their research provides the best evidence to date for the role of visual cues as a barrier to breeding across species.
Some clover species have two forms, one of which releases cyanide to discourage nibbling by snails and insects and the other of which does not. A scientist at Washington University in St. Louis found that this "polymorphism" has evolved independently in six different species of clover, each time by the wholesale deletion of a gene. The clover species are in a sense predisposed to develop this trait, suggesting that evolution is not entirely free form but instead bumps up against constraints.
Historians can only speculate on what might have been, but a team of evolutionary biologists studying ancient proteins has turned speculation into experiment. They resurrected an ancient ancestor of an important human protein as it existed hundreds of millions of years ago and then used biochemical methods to generate and characterize a huge number of alternative histories that could have ensued from that ancient starting point.
Sex is everywhere in nature. Whether it’s a bird singing or a tiny yeast cell secreting chemicals to attract the opposite mating type, sex has profoundly shaped the appearance, behavior and evolution of many organisms. In recognition of the importance of the genetic and evolutionary forces underlying sex differences and sex determination, the Genetics Society of America journals GENETICS and G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics announce an ongoing collection of research articles on the genetics of sex.
An imbalance of female sex hormones among men in Western nations may be contributing to high levels of male obesity, according to new research from the University of Adelaide.
On opposite sides of the globe over millions of years, the snakes of North America and Australia independently evolved similar body types that helped them move and capture prey more efficiently.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified the evolutionary origins of human herpes simplex virus (HSV) -1 and -2, reporting that the former infected hominids before their evolutionary split from chimpanzees 6 million years ago while the latter jumped from ancient chimpanzees to ancestors of modern humans – Homo erectus – approximately 1.6 million years ago.
The findings in the paper, titled “Protective buttressing of the hominin face,” present an alternative to the previous long-held hypothesis that the evolution of the robust faces of our early ancestors resulted largely from the need to chew hard-to-crush foods such as nuts.
Intriguing findings about four species communicating via scent.
Birds come in astounding variety—from hummingbirds to emus—and behave in myriad ways: they soar the skies, swim the waters, and forage the forests. But this wasn’t always the case, according to research by scientists at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum.
A new study of how biodiversity arises shows how a mutation in a single gene in development can lead to different consequences not only in jaw shape, but how this leads to different feeding strategies. It is among the first to show how one genetic change influences trait development and function.
Australia can no longer lay claim to the origins of the iconic New Zealand kiwi following University of Adelaide research published in the journal Science today showing the kiwi’s closest relative is not the emu as was previously thought.
An international committee selected the top 10 from among the approximately 18,000 new species named during the previous year.
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