Today, there are more than 8 billion human beings on the planet. Our species dominate Earth’s landscapes, and our activities are driving large numbers...
Paleontologists from Yunnan University, the University of Leicester and the Natural History Museum, London have conducted a microtomographic study of new...
The fossilized remains of the Miocene-period ape species Anadoluvius turkae have been unearthed at the paleotological site of Çorakyerler in central Anatolia,...
Paleontologists have examined a collection of 160-million-year-old sea spider fossils from Southern France. The rare specimens show that the diversity...
Hupehsuchus nanchangensis, a species of marine reptile that lived between 249 and 247 million years ago in what is now China, had soft structures such...
Plant-eating insects are the most diverse group of multicellular organisms on Earth. The most discussed drivers of their inordinate taxonomic and functional...
The thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) is the largest of modern-day carnivorous marsupials and was hunted to extinction by European settlers in Australia....
Bees are the most significant pollinators of flowering plants. This partnership began approximately 120 million years ago, but the uncertainty of how and...
Precise radiocarbon dating indicates that Panagrolaimus kolymaensis, a species of soil nematode new to science, remained in cryptobiosis for about 46,000...
Living amphibians include frogs and salamanders and the limbless worm-like caecilians (order Gymnophiona). Caecilians have cylindrical bodies with a compact,...
The evolution of life on Earth has changed dramatically at tens of million-year time scales. However, the causal mechanisms of these changes remain unclear....
Feathers are a primitive trait among pennaraptoran dinosaurs, which today are represented by living birds, the only clade of dinosaurs to survive the end-Cretaceous...
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...
Most living angiosperms (flowering plants) are pollinated by insects, and the new reconstruction of the ancestral pollination mode of angiosperms suggests...
Osteoderms are bony plates found in the skin of vertebrates, mostly commonly in reptiles where they have evolved independently multiple times, suggesting...
The dispersal of anatomically modern Homo sapiens out of Africa and across Eurasia provides a unique opportunity to examine the impacts of genetic selection...
Taking someone else’s visual perspective marks an evolutionary shift in the formation of advanced social cognition. It enables using others’ attention...
Scientists from the Florida Museum of Natural History and elsewhere have sequenced 391 genes from nearly 2,300 butterfly species, sampled from 90 countries...
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...
The long-necked dinosaurs, sauropods, are famous for their extreme body sizes, evolving body masses several times greater than the next-heaviest terrestrial...
