Charles Darwin News

April 30, 2025

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What Rattlesnake Venom Can Teach Us About Evolution: New USF Study

Apr. 23, 2025 — A new study found that some rattlesnakes are producing simpler venoms containing fewer and more focused toxin families than complex venoms -- a surprising discovery that challenges long-held ideas about how living alongside a variety of other ...

Phoenician Culture Spread Mainly Through Cultural Exchange

Apr. 23, 2025 — Ancient DNA analysis challenges our understanding of the ancient Phoenician-Punic civilization. An international team of researchers analyzing genome-wide data from 210 ancient individuals has found that Levantine Phoenician towns contributed little ...

The Eukaryotic Cell Emerged as an Evolutionary Algorithmic Phase Transition

Apr. 21, 2025 — An international collaboration has published groundbreaking research, shedding light on the most significant increase in complexity in the history of life's evolution on Earth: the origin of the eukaryotic ...

How Activity in Earth's Mantle Led the Ancient Ancestors of Elephants, Giraffes, and Humans Into Asia and Africa

Apr. 21, 2025 — What roils beneath the Earth's surface may feel a world away, but the activity can help forge land masses that dictate ocean circulation, climate patterns, and even animal activity and evolution. In ...

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Unlocking the Genetic Basis of Adaptive Evolution: Study Reveals Complex Chromosomal Rearrangements in a Stick Insect

Apr. 18, 2025 — Scientists report adaptive divergence in cryptic color pattern is underlain by two distinct, complex chromosomal rearrangements, where millions of ...

Environmental Variability Promotes the Evolution of Cooperation Among Humans: A Simulation-Based Analysis

Apr. 18, 2025 — Researchers have demonstrated that intensified environmental variability (EV) can promote the evolution of cooperation through simulation based on ...

Footprints Reveal Prehistoric Scottish Lagoons Were Stomping Grounds for Giant Jurassic Dinosaurs

Apr. 2, 2025 — Jurassic dinosaurs milled about ancient Scottish lagoons, leaving up to 131 footprints at a newly discovered stomping ground on the Isle of Skye in ...

Mammoth Genetic Diversity Throughout the Last Million Years

Apr. 9, 2025 — A new genomic study has uncovered long-lost genetic diversity in mammoth lineages spanning over a million years, providing new insights into the evolutionary history of these ...

Machine Learning Helps Construct an Evolutionary Timeline of Bacteria

Apr. 3, 2025 — Scientists have helped to construct a detailed timeline for bacterial evolution, suggesting some bacteria used oxygen long before evolving the ability to produce it through ...

Bees Actively Adjust Flower Choice Based on Color and Distance: Updating 'Flower Constancy' Beyond Darwin's Theory

Apr. 3, 2025 — Since Darwin's time, the phenomenon known as flower constancy -- i.e., where insects consistently visit the same flower type even when many others ...

First Ancient Genomes from the Green Sahara Deciphered

Apr. 2, 2025 — An international team has sequenced the first ancient genomes from the so-called Green Sahara, a period when the largest desert in the world temporarily turned into a humid savanna-like environment. ...

Discovery of Quina Technology Challenges View of Ancient Human Development in East Asia

Mar. 31, 2025 — Researchers have uncovered a complete Quina technological system in the Longtan site in southwest China. The discovery challenges the widely held ...

'She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not': Physical Forces Encouraged Evolution of Multicellular Life, Scientists Propose

Mar. 31, 2025 — A study presents a striking example of cooperative organization among cells as a potential force in the evolution of multicellular life. The study is ...

Scientists Uncover Key Mechanism in Evolution: Whole-Genome Duplication Drives Long-Term Adaptation

Mar. 26, 2025 — Scientists uncovered how whole-genome duplication emerges and remains stable over thousands of generations of evolution in the ...

Earliest Days of Earth's Formation

Mar. 26, 2025 — New research sheds light on the earliest days of the earth's formation and potentially calls into question some earlier assumptions in planetary science about the early years of rocky planets. ...

How Did the Large Brain Evolve?

Mar. 26, 2025 — Two specific genes that evolve exclusively in humans jointly influence the development of the cerebrum. Researchers have provided evidence that these genes contribute together to the evolutionary ...

Were Large Soda Lakes the Cradle of Life?

Mar. 25, 2025 — Life needs sufficient phosphorus. However, the element is scarce, not only today but also at the time of the origin of life. So where was there sufficient phosphorus four billion years ago for life ...

The Evolution of Low-Temperature Adapted Enzymes

Mar. 25, 2025 — Enzymes originally evolved in high-temperature environments and later adapted to lower temperatures as Earth cooled. Scientists discovered that a key shift in enzyme function occurred over ...

Origin of Life: How Microbes Laid the Foundation for Complex Cells

Mar. 21, 2025 — Who were our earliest ancestors? The answer could lie in a special group of single-celled organisms with a cytoskeleton similar to that of complex organisms, such as animals and ...

From Dinosaurs to Birds: The Origins of Feather Formation

Mar. 20, 2025 — Feathers, essential for thermoregulation, flight, and communication in birds, originate from simple appendages known as proto-feathers, which were present in certain dinosaurs.By studying embryonic ...

Researchers Propose New Hypothesis for the Origin of Stone Tools

Mar. 20, 2025 — Sharp stone technology chipped over three million years allowed early humans to exploit animal and plant food resources. But how did the production of stone tools -- called 'knapping' -- ...

Genetic Study Reveals Hidden Chapter in Human Evolution

Mar. 18, 2025 — Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the ...

When Did Human Language Emerge?

Mar. 18, 2025 — Humans' unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago, according to a survey of genomic evidence. As such, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ...

Iguanas Floated One-Fifth of the Way Around the World to Colonize Fiji

Mar. 17, 2025 — The only iguanas outside the Americas, Fiji iguanas are an enigma. A new genetic analysis shows that they are most closely related to the North American desert iguana, having separated about 34 ...

New Name for One of the World's Rarest Rhinoceroses

Mar. 13, 2025 — A recent study has reclassified the species commonly known as the Javan rhinoceros, proposing a more precise scientific name: Eurhinoceros sondaicus. The research highlights key differences in body ...

Evolution of Plant Network: 600 Million Years of Stress

Mar. 10, 2025 — Without plants on land, humans could not live on Earth. From mosses to ferns to grasses to trees, plants are our food, fodder and timber. All this diversity emerged from an algal ancestor that ...

When Birds Lose the Ability to Fly, Their Bodies Change Faster Than Their Feathers

Feb. 27, 2025 — Researchers examined dozens of bird species in museum collections looking for differences in the feathers and bodies between birds that can fly and birds that can't. They found that when birds ...

Fish Teeth Show How Ease of Innovation Enables Rapid Evolution

Feb. 26, 2025 — It's not what you do, it's how readily you do it. Rapid evolutionary change might have more to do with how easily a key innovation can be gained or lost rather than with the innovation ...

Humans Inherited Their Flexible Joints from the Earliest Jawed Fish

Feb. 25, 2025 — The efficient architecture of our joints, which allows our skeletons to be flexible and sturdy, originated among our most ancient jawed fish ancestors, according to a new ...

New Study Reveals Neanderthals Experienced Population Crash 110,000 Years Ago

Feb. 25, 2025 — A new study suggests that Neanderthals experienced a dramatic loss of genetic variation during the course of their evolution, foreshadowing their eventual extinction. Examination of semicircular ...

Research Provides New Detail on the Impact of Volcanic Activity on Early Marine Life

Feb. 24, 2025 — New analysis of ancient fossilized rocks known as stromatolites, preserved in southern Zimbabwe, suggests strong links to hydrothermal nutrient recycling, 'meaning that early life may in part ...

Does Planetary Evolution Favor Human-Like Life? Study Ups Odds We're Not Alone

Feb. 14, 2025 — Humanity may not be extraordinary but rather the natural evolutionary outcome for our planet and likely others, according to a new model for how intelligent life developed on ...

Evolution, Evolution, Evolution: How Evolution Got So Good at Evolving

Feb. 13, 2025 — The field of evolution examines how organisms adapt to their environments over generations, but what about the evolution of evolution ...

Birds Have Developed Complex Brains Independently from Mammals

Feb. 13, 2025 — New research has revealed that birds, reptiles, and mammals have developed complex brain circuits independently, despite sharing a common ancestor. These findings challenge the traditional view of ...