evolution

A Europe-wide habitat model suggests climate shifts moved Neanderthal refuges without erasing them, while weak links among some regions may have made small populations harder to rescue after local shocks.

Buried beneath the seafloor near Antarctica for 68 million years, a single fossil egg is rewriting what scientists thought they knew about ancient reptiles. It has no skeleton, no obvious owner, and a shape that doesn't match anything paleontologists expected to find there.

Earlier development of diverse antimicrobial peptides may help some toad populations survive devastating chytrid fungus outbreaks. A deadly fungus has devastated frog and toad populations around the world, yet some groups eventually begin to recover even while the pathogen remains. Researchers led by University College London (UCL), ZSL, and Imperial College London have now identified [...]

Journalist and author Lise Barnéoud talks to Live Science about her book "Hidden Guests," which dives into the field of microchimerism and how it's transforming our knowledge of genetics, immunology and evolution.

Scientists have overturned a leading explanation for why male and female bonnethead sharks have differently shaped heads. Instead of males developing a pointed snout at maturity, both sexes actually begin with more pointed heads that become rounder with age, particularly in females.

And they could shed light on our own language acquisition The post Chimps Have Accents, Too appeared first on Nautilus .

[biorxiv.org] The evolutionary basis for the selection of the standard proteinogenic amino acids remains elusive, particularly for the long cationic amino acids, lysine and arginine, which were likely scarce in […] The post Prebiotic Cationic Amino Acids Support Formation Of An Ancient Protein Fold appeared first on Astrobiology .

Ancient DNA confirms Miracinonyx trumani was more closely related to modern pumas than cheetahs and had a more varied diet than previously thought.

Research into evolutionary history of kissing and how soil organisms break down buried underwear receive top comic science award as well

Morning glories may be getting caught in an evolutionary tug-of-war between surviving climate change and attracting increasingly scarce pollinators. Over just nine years, researchers found that the plants’ rate of adaptation plunged by 96%, even though they still had plenty of genetic diversity to evolve.

Fruit, honey and other naturally sweet foods may have helped fuel the evolution of the human brain, according

A newly discovered microbe living inside ancient stromatolite communities may offer a rare look at how complex life first emerged. Researchers captured the first direct images of an Asgard archaeon physically connected to a bacterium, with the two microbes appearing to exchange nutrients and other compounds. Scientists think similar partnerships billions of years ago may have helped produce the f…

If you ask a scientist how life appeared on Earth, they will usually begin the...

Nature Communications, Published online: 03 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41467-026-77351-0 Organisms produce volatile organic compounds for communication, defense and environmental responses, but how this chemodiversity evolved is unclear. This study shows that in gymnosperms, chemodiversity shows weak covariation, core compounds are highly integrated, and both evolve in a punctuated mode.

Come, sit. Let me tell you a story. Listen closely now. Continue Reading Category: Biology , Science Tags: Fire , Language , Speech , Evolution , Brain

Growing evidence that early human relatives do not fit neatly into traditional categories is prompting a proposal to expand the genus Homo. The human family tree is becoming harder to fit into the categories scientists have used for decades. Research from Monash University argues that recent discoveries are blurring the boundaries between our ancestors and [...]

Nature Communications, Published online: 03 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41467-026-76942-1 Insects have evolved diverse strategies to protect their genome-reduced symbionts during vertical transmission. Here, authors show that tortoise beetles have co-opted a Yellow protein to form spheres that protect and transmit the symbiont Stammera.

[Annual Review of Genetics] The authors examine early-diverging metazoans to reevaluate the evolutionary logic of stemness. Rather than viewing stem cells as exceptional, we argue that cellular plasticity represents a deeply conserved attribute of early life.

An isolated population of Neanderthals is shedding new light on their species’ final days. Palaeoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak takes us inside the cave where they lived and died