evolution

A tiny insect has shattered a century-old explanation for why its relatives never conquered the ocean—by doing the impossible every day.

Life paused for nearly 50,000 years, then resumed the moment conditions allowed—a discovery that raises urgent questions about what else might be waiting to wake up as permafrost thaws.

Because an organism isn’t truly “alive” in the biological sense until it can survive as an autonomous, free-living cell, the researchers reached a radical conclusion. How and where did the first forms of life arise? These are the main questions driving research at the Institute of Molecular Evolution at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU). In […]

A human, an octopus, and a coral could hardly look more different - yet deep inside their cells, their chromosomes still carry recognizable pieces of a genome inherited from an animal ancestor that lived more than 600 million years ago.

A new UGA study has determined how to estimate the age of sharks by analyzing changes to individual animal's DNA.

A long-forgotten crocodilian has emerged from the fossil record, revealing a prehistoric world unlike anything seen today. Researchers are uncovering how this ancient predator fit into one of Earth’s most unusual ecosystems.

A piece of amber bought at a Myanmar market was nearly turned into jewelry until scientists discovered a 99-million-year-old feathered dinosaur tail inside.

The unusual-looking bobolink is what's called a bilateral gynandromorph. The bird behaved like a male, eventually wooing a mate and raising fledglings

Ancient microbes appear to have used molybdenum as far back as 3.7 billion years ago, despite the metal being scarce in Earth’s early oceans. Scientists funded by NASA have found that organisms living on Earth more than 3 billion years ago were already using molybdenum, even though the metal was extremely rare in the environment [...]

It’s one of the origins-of-life chicken-or-egg problems: How could RNA have helped give rise to the first cells before there were cells to contain it? Without the compartmentalization of a cell, it would have been extremely difficult for these vulnerable molecules to have found enough of each other in the proverbial primordial soup, let alone […]

Dimetrodon lived in the Permian, before dinosaurs, and belonged to Synapsida, the same major evolutionary branch that later produced mammals.

An artificial intelligence startup called Astromech that’s developing models that can predict biological change has raised $20 million in funding, lifting its valuation to $3.8 billion. The round was led by biotechnology investor Bob Nelsen and saw the participation of Peak 6, NeoGenesis Capital, Builders VC and CAZ Investments, bringing the company’s total amount raised […] The post Astromech ra…

Scientists have identified exceptionally rare soft tissue preserved in a 450-million-year-old crinoid fossil, more than 200 million years older than the first dinosaurs. Its delicate tube feet offer a remarkable new window into how some of Earth’s earliest reef animals lived, fed, and evolved.

A 621-species evolutionary analysis finds that arthropods repeatedly gained and lost five forms of sperm grouping, while the function of those cellular teams remains unsettled.

The difference between previous mass extinctions and this one is that we can still stop it—if we act before the window closes.

Sometime in Earth's distant past, nearly 4 billion years ago, our planet's earliest lifeforms somehow...

A new study has broken down all the ways that the old distinctions between the “Homo” in “Homo sapiens” and several closely related ancient primate categories are falling apart.

Recent advances in our understanding of human evolution challenge the way we currently name and classify our ancestors, according to new research from Monash University. The study, published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, argues that we need a rethink and proposes reclassifying all species of humans and our closely related fossil relatives that […]

About 15,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers in the southern Levant began living in more fixed settlements. This shift marked a major change in daily life before farming began. New research shows another change followed. Natufian communities regularly ate lizards and snakes, adding reptiles to their food supply for thousands of years. The study, published in Proceedings […]