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Instead of the domesticated horses deriving from today's wild horses, it's the other way around.
Sometimes, it's good to remember that even evolution doesn't want you to be perfect. Good enough is just fine.
Plants might have moved on to the land 100 million years earlier than we thought.
An amazing 'living fossil' suggests ancient marine life evolved the software for walking before the hardware.
Well here's a shocker.
These proto-birds may have evolved just like their modern relatives.
The brain changes and the skull follows.
It's the equivalent of your grandkids being a new species. Pretty crazy.
Growing strong!
Life's always greener on the other side. Even if that's the ocean.
Long neck, long history.
Natural selection fosters certain qualities so aliens shouldn't look extremely different from humans.
I know what you were thinking about. Birds, they're birds.
Soon they'll carry little smartphones around. I hope.
Those majestic lions, with a harem of females? They're just compensating for something.
Specifically, they put their shoulders into it.
“Imagine a camel without a hump, with feet like a slender rhino, and a head shaped like a saiga antelope."
“We believe that these subjects are beyond their [students] comprehension,” said a senior Turkish bureaucrat at the Education Ministry.
We may have to thank Christian monks for today's chicken.
#wingmen.
Chow down.
*pause*
These fish are quite comfortable out of water.
It's all about the tail.
This means being carnivores must have been an excellent solution for these plants.
Researchers have found a very old and "alien like" insect and they've decided it doesn't fit anywhere in the current tree of life.
Real-time evolution, what more proof do you need?
Our beloved hands are coded by the same genes that make fish fins.
Kinda looks like an end-boss in an RPG.
Looks like happy hour isn't just a human thing.
The discovery highlights how trait functions can change with evolution.
University of Rochester researchers developed a new evolutionary model that suggests human intelligence developed to meet the demands of our infants, in a self-reinforcing cycle: bigger brains led to shorter pregnancies, requiring parents to have even bigger brains.
A deep, low pitch voice is often sought after in a man, but a new study suggests this characteristic might have evolved to intimidate other males, not attract females.
Found in only eight caves on the border of Thailand and Myanmar, this eyeless fish can walk.
What does a weird tendon on your inner wrist have to do with evolution? This video explains.
Researchers have manipulated the genome of chicken embryos so that they develop dinosaur-like bones in their lower legs.
A new study measuring the forces that shape bacterial genomes determined that a difference in efficiency of hundredth of a percent is sufficient to determine the winners and losers in the evolutionary race.
The latest, most complete tree is the result of a three-year effort by researchers from over a dozen institutions from around the world. They combined tens of thousands of diagrams into one single tree, most easily read as a circle.
New research shows that the first vertebrates had a surprisingly easy time adapting from fins to legs.
A new study examined the way gene families evolve from ancestral genes, finding the original genes were promiscuous in that they had a wider range of function than the later descendant genes, which often evolved to be more selective in their effects.
Where are all the aliens? Why haven’t we seen or heard their signals from space? Could we really have been the only planet where life evolved?
Once with the advent of agriculture, and its spread to Europe from the Near East, human society was transformed forever. Resources became more plentiful, communities could stay in one place and develop, and humans were free to pursue other activities. Agriculture turbo boosted the division of labor, an essential prerequisite to any civilization. Agriculture not only transformed human society, it also modified our DNA. A first of its kind study compared the DNA of ancient humans who lived between 8,500 and 2,300 years ago. The analysis revealed that humans underwent widespread genetic changes that influence height, immune system, digestion and skin colour once agriculture was introduced.
As more Millennials are leaving religion in droves, or choosing not to identify with any faith, acceptance of evolution among the public strengthens.
Self-preservation and reproduction are the most powerful instincts, and life forms on Earth have devised all sorts of gimmicks and tactics to become successful (pass on those genes). Just look at the male ruff sneak tactics to grab girls. There are three distinct approaches: the cocky aggressive, the sneaky 'satellite, and the cross-dresser. You might think this isn't necessarily peculiar in itself. After all, human males employ similar approaches to seek women's attention. The peacock, the friend-zone dude, the jock, the joker etc. What's odd about ruff males is that this behavior is coded inside their genes - from the way they act, to how their plumage looks like. And they're all, ultimately, males of the same species.
The concepts of biodiversity and evolution are generally thought of as something that occurs in thousands, maybe millions of years - but every once in a while, scientists catch a species red handed: evolving, becoming a new species.
We humans arguably came to dominate the world thanks to our dexterous hands, which allow gripping tools and manipulating objects. An eccentric professor at University of Utah agrees, but with a twist. According to David Carrier there's a secondary evolutionary driver that led our hands to reach their current shape and dexterity: fist punching. To illustrate his hypothesis, Carrier turned to a macabre experiment in which cadaver hands clenched in various positions, from open hand to a good old sucker punch fist, were bashed against a dumbbell. Carrier showed that a fist could handle the strike with double the force supported by an open hand before bones started to break.
A new paper published Thursday in Science looks at how climate change is (out of all things) making the tongue of some bumble bees shrink. Two species of alpine bumbles in the Rocky Mountains already show a decrease in tongue volume of nearly 25 percent in the last 40 years; and smaller tongues could spell big trouble for the flowers that rely on bumble bees for pollination.
Some researchers have made an interesting connection: if you measure the complexity of life or how big the genome is you find it increases at a rate that seems exponential. It's very similar to Moore's law, which suggests the number of transistors over the same surface area on a chip doubles almost every two years. You can extrapolate both forward and background. Eventually, if you extrapolate down enough you'll find the point of origin. In other words, it's possible to estimate when life first appeared based on life's complexity graph.
Love is complicated enough, even without intense scrutiny from scientists. Do we fall in love with someone because we find our partner's genetic makeup to be satisfying and thus improve the chance of having better offspring? Or is it a bit more mysterious than this - a lot more personal? For humans, the latter looks like the case, but we're far from being alone. Zebra finches, which are also monogamous, choose their mates for idiosyncratic reasons as shown by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology. The finches who chose their partners based on behavioral compatibility were less likely to shrug from their parental duties and had offspring which had the best chance of reaching adulthood. This elegant experiment proves that choosing a mate isn't all about who has the brightest plumage or the biggest stomach - love has a huge part to play as well. The similarities to humans are uncanny.
A robotics team lead by Cambridge University engineer Fumiya Iida have designed a robot that archeologists of the future (they will all be robots) will recognize as the moment the machines started to take over. They built a "mother" device that can create smaller, "baby" robots, and programed it (her?) so that experience obtained building them would be used to improve upon further generations.
