Evolution News

October 11, 2024

Top Headlines

Newly Discovered Late Cretaceous Birds May Have Carried Heavy Prey Like Extant Raptors

Oct. 9, 2024 — Newly discovered birds from Late Cretaceous North America were hawk-sized and had powerful raptor-like feet, according to a new ...

New Seed Fossil Sheds Light on Wind Dispersal in Plants

Oct. 8, 2024 — Scientists have discovered one of the earliest examples of a winged seed, granting insight into the origin and early evolution of wind dispersal strategies in ...

Pterosaurs Needed Feet on the Ground to Become Giants

Oct. 4, 2024 — A study determines when and how pterosaurs went from tiny tree-climbers to towering terrestrial titans Flying reptiles first came down from the trees in the mid-Jurassic Period, paving the way for giants with 10-meter wingspans. Fingers and toes ...

New Findings Supply Corrective to Evolutionary Hypothesis

Oct. 3, 2024 — The study blends math, statistics and biology to show that this long-held hyperbolic pattern is an anomaly because it doesn't account for the fact that all species on earth are defined as much by their unique traits as the variation that exists in ...

Latest Headlines

updated 1:28pm EDT

In Studying the Mating Rituals of Fruit Flies, Scientists May Have Learned Something About How Brains Evolve

Oct. 9, 2024 — Researchers have identified how the architecture of brain circuits helps different species flexibly adapt to new mating signals across evolutionary ...

Do Coyotes Have Puppy Dog Eyes? New Study Reveals Wild Canines Share Dog's Famous Expression

Oct. 2, 2024 — A new study challenges the hypothesis that 'puppy dog eyes' evolved exclusively in dogs as a result of ...

World's Oldest Cheese Reveals Origins of Kefir

Sep. 25, 2024 — Scientists successfully extracted and analyzed DNA from ancient cheese samples found alongside the Tarim Basin mummies in China, dating back approximately 3,600 years. The research suggests a new ...

Reconstructing the Evolutionary History of the Grape Family

Sep. 25, 2024 — Until now, it was believed that plants of the grape family arrived at the European continent less than 23 million years ago. A study on fossil plants draws a new scenario on the dispersal of the ...

Brazilian Fossils Reveal Jaw-Dropping Discovery in Mammal Evolution

Sep. 25, 2024 — The discovery of new cynodont fossils from southern Brazil by a team of palaeontologists has led to a significant breakthrough in understanding the evolution of ...

Unveiling Ancient Life: New Method Sheds Light on Early Cellular and Metabolic Evolution

Sep. 24, 2024 — Analyzing fossils can be difficult -- especially when they're so small that they can only be seen with a microscope. Researchers have now come up ...

Researchers Publish Breakthrough Study on How New Genes Evolve

Sep. 19, 2024 — Findings suggest that new genes can form by repurposing fragments of ancestral genes while incorporating entirely new coding regions (the protein-coding parts of the DNA). This innovative concept ...

Insights Into South African Population History from 10,000-Year-Old Human DNA

Sep. 19, 2024 — Ancient DNA has provided spectacular insights into human history, particularly in Europe and Asia, where researchers have reconstructed the genomes ...

New Fossil Fish Species Scales Up Evidence of Earth's Evolutionary March

Sep. 12, 2024 — Climate change and asteroids are linked with animal origin and extinction -- and plate tectonics also seems to play a key evolutionary role, 'groundbreaking' new fossil research reveals. The ...

Genomics Reveals Sled Dogs' Siberian Lineage

Sep. 16, 2024 — New research examines thousands of years of Arctic sled dog ancestry and reveals when and how Siberian and Alaskan sled dogs' DNA ...

The Neanderthals May Have Become Extinct Because of Their Isolated Lifestyle

Sep. 12, 2024 — Neanderthal remains recently discovered in a cave in France support well-known theory of why the Neanderthals became extinct, researchers behind a new study ...

Flightless Parrot in New Zealand Developed Different Feather Colors to Evade Predatory Birds

Sep. 10, 2024 — Aotearoa New Zealand's flightless parrot, the k k p , evolved two different color types to potentially help them avoid detection by a now-extinct apex predator, researchers ...

Agriculture Accelerated Human Genome Evolution to Capture Energy from Starchy Foods

Sep. 4, 2024 — Scientists have suspected that modern humans have more genes to digest starch than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but the amylase locus of the genome is hard to study. Researchers have now developed ...

Genomic Dark Matter Solves Butterfly Evolutionary Riddle

Aug. 30, 2024 — Researchers have uncovered a surprising genetic mechanism that influences the vibrant and complex patterns on butterfly wings. The team discovered that an RNA molecule, rather than a protein as ...

Darwin's Fear Was Unjustified: Writing Evolutionary History by Bridging the Gaps a Big Issue

Aug. 26, 2024 — Fossils are used to reconstruct evolutionary history, but not all animals and plants become fossils and many fossils are destroyed before we can find them (e.g., the rocks that contain the fossils ...

Bonobos and Ancient Origin of the 'Common Enemy Effect'

Aug. 23, 2024 — A link between outgroup threats and ingroup cohesion has been considered since the time of Darwin to be an adaptation for group-based competition. During the years since, studies of all sorts -- from ...

Creature the Size of a Dust Grain Found Hiding in California's Mono Lake

Aug. 22, 2024 — Mono Lake is a beautiful but harsh environment, its salty and arsenic-laced water home to brine shrimp, alkali flies and little else. Scientists recently discovered an unsuspected resident, however, ...

How Baleen Whales Have Adapted Over the Past 50 Million Years

Aug. 22, 2024 — The largest dataset of cetacean genes ever collated has helped scientists deep dive 'into the blue' to fathom the 'triumph' of baleen whale evolution. The new study explores the ...

Life from a Drop of Rain: New Research Suggests Rainwater Helped Form the First Protocell Walls

Aug. 21, 2024 — New research shows that rainwater could have helped create a meshy wall around protocells 3.8 billion years ago, a critical step in the transition from tiny beads of RNA to every bacterium, plant, ...

Fossil Hotspots in Africa Obscure a More Complete Picture of Human Evolution

Aug. 20, 2024 — A new study shows how the mismatch between where fossils are preserved and where humans likely lived may influence our understanding of early human ...

Decoding the World's Largest Animal Genome

Aug. 14, 2024 — Scientists have sequenced the largest genome of all animals, the lungfish genome. Their data help to explain how the fish-ancestors of today's land vertebrates were able to conquer ...

Rewriting the Evolutionary History of Critical Components of the Nervous System

Aug. 13, 2024 — A new study has rewritten the conventionally understood evolutionary history of certain ion channels -- proteins critical for electrical signaling in the nervous system. The study shows that the ...

Smallest Arm Bone in Human Fossil Record Sheds Light on the Dawn of Homo Floresiensis

Aug. 6, 2024 — A new study reports the discovery of extremely rare early human fossils from the Indonesian island of Flores, including an astonishingly small adult limb bone. Dated to about 700,000 years old, the ...

Sea Level Changes Shaped Early Life on Earth, Fossil Study Reveals

Aug. 2, 2024 — Shifts in the Earth's continental plates that drove long-term changes in sea level set the stage for the evolution of the earliest animals on Earth, a study ...

Half a Billion-Year-Old Spiny Slug Reveals the Origins of Mollusks

Aug. 2, 2024 — Exceptional fossils with preserved soft parts reveal that the earliest mollusks were flat, armored slugs without shells. The new species, Shishania aculeata, was covered with hollow, organic, ...

Demographics of North African Human Populations Unravelled Using Genomic Data and Artificial Intelligence

Aug. 2, 2024 — A new study places the origin of the Imazighen in the Epipaleolithic, more than twenty thousand years ago. The research concludes that the genetic origin of the current Arab population of north ...

Fossil Shows How Penguins' Wings Evolved

Aug. 2, 2024 — A tiny fossil penguin plays a huge role in the evolutionary history of the bird, an international study ...

Scientists Untangle Interactions Between the Earth's Early Life Forms and the Environment Over 500 Million Years

July 29, 2024 — The atmosphere, the ocean and life on Earth interacted over the past 500-plus million years in ways that improved conditions for early organisms to thrive. Now, an interdisciplinary team of ...

The Ancestor of All Modern Birds Probably Had Iridescent Feathers

July 26, 2024 — Birds tend to be more colorful in the tropics, and scientists wanted to find out how they got there: if colorful feathers evolved in the tropics, or if tropical birds have brightly-colored ancestors ...

Lampreys Possess a 'Jaw-Dropping' Evolutionary Origin

July 26, 2024 — Lampreys are one of only two living jawless vertebrates Jaws are formed by a key stem cell population called the neural crest New research reveals the gene regulatory changes that may explain ...