A study by researchers in Austria and the US finds evidence that the different cell types that make up organs have arisen only once during the course of evolution. The programs to develop these cells have been passed on ever since. The study which is published online by Nature Genetics has been supported by the GEN-AU Programme of the Austrian Ministry for Science and Research.
In modern ecology, the removal or addition of a predator to an ecosystem can produce dramatic changes in the population of prey species. For the first time, scientists have observed the same dynamics in the fossil record, thanks to a mass extinction that decimated ocean life 360 million years ago.
Exotic bacteria that do not rely on oxygen may have played an important role in determining the composition of Earth’s early atmosphere, according to a theory that UChicago researcher Albert Colman of a volcanic crater in Siberia.
Birds are known more for their senses of vision and hearing than smell, but new research suggests that millions of years ago, the winged critters also boasted a better sense for scents.
A team of scientists from Columbia University, Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Granada in Spain have successfully reconstructed active enzymes from four-billion-year-old extinct organisms. By measuring the properties of these enzymes, they could examine the conditions in which the extinct organisms lived. The results shed new light on how life has adapted to changes in the environment from ancient to modern Earth.
Research by Tufts biologists shows that wingless "stay-at-home" female fireflies get less support from their mates than females able to fly. Some male fireflies donate a "nuptial gift" to mates--sperm wrapped in a nutritious high-protein package. When a species' females lose the ability to fly, the males evolve to transfer only sperm, with no food gift.
A new study reveals that a group of ancient enzymes adapted to substantial changes in ocean temperature and acidity during the last four billion years, providing evidence that life on Early Earth evolved from a much hotter, more acidic environment to the cooler, less acidic global environment today.
Scientists from the United States and China have discovered the first intact fossil of a mature eudicot, a type of flowering plant whose membership includes buttercups, apple trees, maple trees, dandelions and proteas. The 125 million-year-old find, described in this week's Nature, reveals a remarkably developed species.
UAB professor uses evolution talks to teach civil discourse.
Calling it the “new periodic table for flies,” researchers at North Carolina State University and collaborators across the globe have mapped the evolutionary history of flies, providing a framework for further comparative studies on the insects that comprise more than 10 percent of all life on Earth.
Humans had been believed to be different from other primates in the measure of how mortality increases with advancing adult age, but this research shows that is not the case.
Polygamy practiced by some 19th century Mormon men had the curious effect of suppressing the overall offspring numbers of Mormon women in plural marriages, say scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and three other institutions in the March 2011 issue of Evolution and Human Behavior.
The most popular model used by geneticists for the last 35 years to detect the footprints of human evolution may overlook more common subtle changes, a new international study finds.
Scientists discover a genetic variant that allows a fish in the Hudson River to live in waters heavily polluted by PCBs.
Rising carbon dioxide levels associated with global warming may affect interactions between plants and the insects that eat them, altering the course of plant evolution, research at the University of Michigan suggests.
Anthropologists from GW and NYU question claims that several prominent fossil discoveries made in the last decade are our human ancestors. With a more nuanced explanation of the fossils' place on the Tree of Life, the authors conclude that instead of being our ancestors, the fossils are more likely belong to extinct distant cousins.
In a paper recently published in Current Anthropology, SBU Professor John Shea disproves the myth that the earliest humans were significantly different from us.
Evolution is not a steady march towards ever more sophisticated beings and therefore the search for the living "missing links" is pointless, according to findings published by a team of researchers led by Dr. Hervé Philippe of the Université de Montréal's Department of Biochemistry.
Leafcutter ants, signature denizens of New World tropical forests, are unique in their ability to harvest fresh leaves to cultivate a nutrient-rich fungus as food.
A new study by a Stony Brook University professor shows that structures that have been evolutionarily lost for hundreds of millions of years can be regained.
The discovery that a large cluster of genes appears to have jumped directly from one species of fungus to another significantly strengthens the argument that a different metaphor, such as a mosaic, may be more appropriate to describe the process of evolution than the traditional tree of life.
In analyzing the molecular sensor for the plant growth hormone brassinolide, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies discovered that although plants took an evolutionary path different from their animal cousins, they arrived at similar solutions to a common problem: How to reliably receive and process incoming signals.
In a new study, scientists at the University of Maryland and the Institut Pasteur show that bacteria evolve new abilities, such as antibiotic resistance, predominantly by acquiring genes from other bacteria. The researchers new insights into the evolution of bacteria partly contradict the widely accepted theory that new biological functions in bacteria and other microbes arise primarily through the process of gene duplication within the same organism.
New research shows how humans, unlike any other species on Earth, readily learn to throw long distances. This research also suggests that this unique evolutionary trait is entangled with language development in a way critical to our very existence.
In a first-of-its-kind experiment, a University of Vermont scientist created robots that, like tadpoles becoming frogs, change their body forms while learning how to walk. These evolving robots learned to walk more rapidly than robots with fixed bodies and developed a more robust gait.
A team of paleontologists and geologists from Argentina and the United States on Jan. 13 announced the discovery of a lanky dinosaur that roamed South America in search of prey as the age of dinosaurs began, about 230 million years ago. Sporting a long neck and tail and weighing only 10 to 15 pounds, the dinosaur has been named Eodromaeus, the “dawn runner.”
A SCUBA expedition in Australia and New Zealand to find the rare embryos of an unusual shark cousin enabled American and British researchers to confirm new developmental similarities between fish and mammals. The study confirms that organisms separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution share similar genetic programs for body formation.
Whitehead Institute researchers have determined that heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90) can create diverse heritable traits in brewer’s yeast by affecting a large portion of the yeast genome. The researchers conclude that Hsp90 was key in shaping the evolutionary history of the yeast genome, and likely others as well.
University of Adelaide researchers are a step closer to unraveling the mysteries of human sexual development, following genetic studies that show male mice can be created without a Y chromosome – through the activation of an ancient brain gene.
Those crafty creationists just won't let up. Since they can't get their way in the courts or state legislatures, their new tactic is to attack the curriculum itself, from science standards to textbooks, forcing teachers to teach science the creationist way.
New genes that have evolved in species as little as one million years ago – a virtual blink in evolutionary history – can be just as essential for life as ancient genes, startling new research has discovered. The University of Chicago study challenges evolutionary biology assumptions about the importance of new genes in development.
A mathematically driven evolutionary snapshot of woody plants in four similar climates shows that genetic diversity is more sensitive to extinctions and loss of habitat them than long thought.
Microbiologists Derek Lovley, Zarath Summers and colleagues report in the Dec. 2 issue of Science that they’ve discovered a surprising new cooperative behavior in bacteria known as interspecies electron transfer. It could have important implications for the global carbon cycle and bioenergy.
Research led by two UIC biologists found that the strong short-term advantages enjoyed by self-fertilizing plants can be offset by long-term advantages found in species that strictly avoid self-fertilization. The finding, reported in Science, underscores that both individual and species characteristics can strongly shape how a group of plants evolve and diversify.
Water fleas from clear-water alpine ponds are better able to withstand UV radiation, even with little natural protection, than fleas in nearby ponds with water that isn't as clear.
A UNH professor of biochemistry and her colleagues have identified the first reproductive hormone of the hagfish – a gonadatropin -- representing a significant step toward unraveling the mystery of hagfish reproduction. At 500 million years old, hagfish are the oldest living vertebrate, predating the dinosaurs.
By reconstructing an ancient protein and tracing how it subtly changed over vast periods of time to produce scores of modern-day descendants, scientists have shown how evolution tinkers with early forms and leaves the impression that complexity evolved many times.
The more complex a plant or animal, the more difficulty it should have adapting to changes in the environment. That's been a maxim of evolutionary theory since biologist Ronald Fisher put forth the idea in 1930.
Few people think about the 400 million years of evolution that took place before they could chomp on a carrot, but University of Arkansas anthropologist Peter Ungar does, and he’s written a book about it.
The NCSE is offering free evolution book excerpts on its web site (www.ncse.com).
Falsely advertising one's fighting ability might seem like a good strategy for a wimp who wants to come off as a toughie, but in paper wasp societies, such deception is discouraged through punishment, experiments at the University of Michigan suggest.
By deciphering the genetics in humans and fish, scientists now believe that the neck – that little body part between your head and shoulders – gave humans so much freedom of movement that it played a surprising and major role in the evolution of the human brain, according to New York University and Cornell University neuroscientists in the online journal Nature Communications (July 27, 2010.)
The first expedition to search for deep-sea hydrothermal vents along the Mid-Cayman Rise has turned up three distinct types of hydrothermal venting, reports an interdisciplinary team led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The work was conducted as part of a NASA-funded effort to search extreme environments for geologic, biologic, and chemical clues to the origins and evolution of life.
When paleontologist Iyad Zalmout went looking for fossil whales and dinosaurs in Saudi Arabia, he never expected to come face-to-face with a significant, early primate fossil.
A study undertaken to help scientists concerned with abnormal brain development in premature babies has serendipitously revealed evolution’s imprint on the human brain.
It has been a basic principle of evolution for more than a century that plants and animals can adapt genetically in ways that help them better survive and reproduce. Now, in a paper to be published in the journal Science, University of Rochester biologist John Jaenike and colleagues document a clear example of a new mechanism for evolution.
One of the most pivotal steps in evolution-the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms-may not have required as much retooling as commonly believed, found a globe-spanning collaboration of scientists led by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the US Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute.
A new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine finds that a comparable region in the brains of chickens concerned with analyzing auditory inputs is constructed similarly to that of mammals.
A new study shows that humans and tiny aquatic animals known as rotifers have something important in common when it comes to sex.
Fish really is “brain food.” And it seems that even pre-humans living as far back as 2 million years ago somehow knew it.
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