A new method for extracting precise information from tiny “spherules” embedded in layers of rock has allowed researchers to record precise information about asteroids impacting Earth from 3.5 billion to 35 million years ago. West Lafayette, Indiana – Researchers are learning details about asteroid impacts going back to the Earth’s early history by using a [...]

A new study from neurobiologists at Yale University examines the evolutionary changes surrounding the NOS1 gene and suggests that the same evolutionary mechanisms that may have gifted our species with amazing cognitive abilities may have also made us more susceptible to disorders such as autism. A recently evolved pattern of gene activity in the language [...]

A new study of the people from the Solomon Islands in Melanesia, a group of islands northeast of Australia, has shown that blond hair evolved differently, genetically speaking, than in Europeans. About 5-10% of the people in Melanesia have naturally blond hair, which is the highest prevalence outside of Europe. This refutes the hypothesis that [...]

New research from biologists at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich examines the evolutionary history of the cypress tree, finding that their origins can be traced back to the break-up of Pangea about 153 million years ago. In classical mythology, the cypress tree is associated with death, the underworld and eternity. Indeed, the family to which [...]

As it turns out, even with all our medical technology and health education, we can’t outrun the findings of Charles Darwin. A study conducted by an international collaboration of scientists shows that humans are continuing to evolve just like other species in the wild. New evidence proves humans are continuing to evolve and that significant [...]

New findings from a team of Swedish-Danish evolutionary biologists show that the genetic variation of today’s Europeans was strongly affected by immigrant Stone Age farmers. The study involved comparisons of thousands of genetic markers from four Stone Age skeletons to genetic data from living individuals. One of the most debated developments in human history is [...]

If you thought living on fast-food, candy, soda and red meat was dangerous, try a diet of carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide. That’s what researchers at the Max Planck Institute found to be the diet of a small marine worm, Olavius algarvensis, which is thriving on these poisons in the seas off the coast of [...]

Ash was discovered in a South African cave, and this indicates that humans were cooking with fire one million years ago. This is the earliest use of fire but experts say that more proof is needed to conclude that humans were cooking with fire regularly. Francesco Berna, an archaeologist, at Boston University in Massachusetts, and [...]

New research pinpoints to certain mutations that may have helped the stickleback, a tiny armored fish, to evolve quickly between saltwater and freshwater forms. Since the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, the ocean-dwelling three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) have repeatedly colonized freshwater streams and lakes. In the last ten generations, marine [...]

In Shark Bay, Australia, the male dolphins are well known to marine biologists for their messy social entanglements. These relationships are so unique, that they’re more like intricate webs of the way that the Cosa Nostra and the Mafia work than the typically vertical hierarchies of chimpanzees. A team of scientists argues in a recent [...]

A new study shows that Saccoglossus kowalevskii, a sea dwelling, bottom-feeding acorn worm, has a similarities to humans although the worms are separated from vertebrates by over 500 million years of evolution. Biologists may need to rethink where to look for evolutionary changes responsible for the origin of vertebrates, including humans, as a result of [...]

The conodont, an extinct primitive marine vertebrate, had the sharpest teeth ever known, with tips just one-twentieth of the width of a human hair, and was able to apply pressures that were comparable with the ones made with human jaws. Conodonts had these razor-sharp teeth and they were jawless vertebrates that evolved 500 million years [...]