Biology News

Jun 27, 2023 by News Staff

Placental mammals — the evolutionary lineage that includes humans — co-existed with non-avian dinosaurs for a short time before the dinosaurs went extinct, according to new research. Life reconstruction of the extinct bear-dog Amphicyon ingens. Image credit: Roman Uchytel. About 66 million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into Earth near the site of the small town of Chicxulub in what is now Mexico. This impact unleashed an incredible...

Jun 26, 2023 by Sergio Prostak

Scientists from Queensland Museum have described three new species of carnivorous demosponges from the Great Barrier Reef, in Queensland, Australia. The...

Jun 26, 2023 by News Staff

Understanding how complex eukaryotic cells emerged from prokaryotic ancestors represents a major challenge in biology. A main point of contention in refining...

Jun 21, 2023 by News Staff

New research shows how the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, a long-used model organism, can use electric fields to ‘jump’ across Petri plates or onto...

Jun 20, 2023 by News Staff

Ancient horses such as Hyracotherium leporinum, a tiny horse relative from the Eocene of England, had feet like those of a modern tapir: four toes in front...

Jun 20, 2023 by News Staff

Aerial parts of plants arrange their organs around stems, and this arrangement defines their structure. In most existing plant species, organs emerge at...

Jun 8, 2023 by Enrico de Lazaro

Using whole-genome sequencing and bioinformatic analysis, scientists provide the first evidence of facultative parthenogenesis in a crocodilian —...

Jun 6, 2023 by Natali Anderson

Most living angiosperms (flowering plants) are pollinated by insects, and the new reconstruction of the ancestral pollination mode of angiosperms suggests...

Jun 6, 2023 by Natali Anderson

The newly-identified species belongs to Mixophyes, an Australo-Papuan group of ground-dwelling frogs. The southern stuttering frog (Mixophyes australis)...

May 29, 2023 by Natali Anderson

Researchers have described a cryptic new species in the spiny-tailed gecko genus Strophurus from inland areas of southern Western Australia. Two individuals...

May 26, 2023 by News Staff

Osteoderms are bony plates found in the skin of vertebrates, mostly commonly in reptiles where they have evolved independently multiple times, suggesting...

May 24, 2023 by Natali Anderson

Researchers have described a new species of the fish genus Sturisoma from Madeira River basin in Bolivia and Brazil. Live specimen of Sturisoma reisi from...

May 22, 2023 by News Staff

Taking someone else’s visual perspective marks an evolutionary shift in the formation of advanced social cognition. It enables using others’ attention...

May 12, 2023 by News Staff

After the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, many mammals underwent a rapid increase in size. Several hypotheses for...

May 5, 2023 by News Staff

The ability to make inferences based on statistical information has so far been tested only in animals having large brains in relation to their body size,...

May 3, 2023 by News Staff

Bose-Einstein condensation of excitons — in which excitons condense into a single coherent quantum state, known as an exciton condensate —...

May 2, 2023 by Natali Anderson

Scientists have described a new species of the jellyfish genus Tripedalia from an intertidal shrimp pond in the Mai Po Nature Reserve, Hong Kong. Morphological...

May 1, 2023 by News Staff

Over the past 100 million years, mammals have adapted to nearly every environment on Earth. Scientists with the Zoonomia Project have been cataloging the...

Apr 28, 2023 by Natali Anderson

The sled dog Balto has been celebrated in books and movies for his role in delivering desperately needed diphtheria antitoxin to Nome, Alaska, in 1925....

Apr 27, 2023 by Enrico de Lazaro

One of the biggest challenges to growing food on Mars is the presence of perchlorate salts, which have been detected in the Martian regolith (soil) and...