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...
Humans have extensively shaped animals and plants through domestication. Although wine and table grapes have been important culturally for thousands of...
Different genetic traits can be beneficial (for example, fending off disease) or harmful (making humans more susceptible to illness), depending on the...
Humans, whales, elephants, and naked mole-rats all share a somewhat rare trait for mammals: their bodies are covered with little to no hair. The common...
Cratonavis zhui, a new species of pygostylian bird from the Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota of China, had a unique combination of a dinosaurian skull with...
Most birds today can lift the upper beak independently of the brain case, enabled by a series of mobile joints and bending zones in the skull. The computed...
Octopuses and their cephalopod relatives are exceptionally intelligent invertebrates with a highly complex nervous system that evolved independently from...
