A Puzzling Mystery: Why Do Salamanders Lose Their Lungs?
Despite lung loss in adults for millions of years, lungless salamanders develop lungs as embryos. For many vertebrates, including humans, their lungs are essential. Four…
Evolutionary Biology News
Yale Researchers Discover a Lonely Giant Tortoise – Whose Species Was Last Seen Over 100 Years Ago
The discovery of a lonely tortoise doubles the number of known individuals of the “phantasticus” species. Evolutionary scientists were perplexed by the finding of a…
The “Fantastic Giant Tortoise” – Believed To Be Extinct – Has Been Found Alive
Stephen Gaughran, a geneticist at Princeton University, has verified that “Fernanda” is related to a tortoise that was taken from Fernandina Island more than a…
Scientists Discover the Real Reason Giraffes Had Long Necks
Fossils demonstrate that head-bashing combat contributed to the development of the long necks of giraffes. The authors of the study propose an alternative theory for the…
Controversial Prehistoric Egg Identified To Be the Last of the “Demon Ducks of Doom”
Researchers identify ancient birds behind prehistoric giant eggs A years-long scientific controversy in Australia about what animal is the true mother of gigantic primordial eggs…
New Evidence Reveals That Megalodons Were Even More Terrifying and Powerful Than Scientists Thought
Megatooth sharks, the largest sharks that have ever existed, were also the greatest apex predators ever measured, according to a new Princeton study According to…
419-Million-Year-Old Chinese Fossil Shows Human Middle Ear Evolved From Fish Gills
The human middle ear—which houses three tiny, vibrating bones—is key to transporting sound vibrations into the inner ear, where they become nerve impulses that allow…
Strange Giraffoid Fossil Solves Giraffe Evolutionary Mystery
Giraffes are quite distinctive due to their extremely long necks. In fact, their necks can be as long as 7.9 feet (2.4 m). Even though…
Convergent Evolution Has Been Fooling Us: Most of Our Evolutionary Trees Could Be Wrong
Scientists say convergent evolution is much more common than previously thought. An evolutionary tree, or phylogenetic tree, is a branching diagram showing the evolutionary relationships…
Great Whites May Have Contributed to Extinction of Megalodon Sharks
Scientists investigated the diet of megalodon, the largest shark to have ever lived, using zinc isotopes. In a new study, researchers compared how high up…
Blind Cave Creatures Light the Way With DNA to Secrets of Evolution
In watery underground caverns, there are strange creatures that live in an eternal midnight. Over the course of generations, these animals have adapted to their…
“Fuel of Evolution” – Raw Material for Evolution More Abundant Than Thought in Wild Animals
The raw material for evolution is much more abundant in wild animals than was previously thought, according to new research from The Australian National University…
Cellular Dynamics: First Panoramic Spatial Atlases of Life
International scientific consortium, the SpatioTemporal Omics Consortium (STOC), produces the first spatiotemporal maps of cellular dynamics in mice, Drosophila, zebrafish, and Arabidopsis, using BGI-Research’s world-leading…
Scientists Crack Egg Forging Evolutionary Scandal Two Million Years in the Making
While many people around the world just finished unwrapping their Easter eggs, scientists have solved one of nature’s biggest criminal cases, an egg forgery scandal…
Link Between Social Life and Brain Structure Discovered in Rhesus Macaques
Researchers from Penn, Inserm, and elsewhere observed that the number of grooming partners an individual animal had predicted the size of brain areas associated with…
Sixth Mass Extinction of Global Biodiversity Is Already in Progress
The history of life on Earth has been marked five times by events of mass biodiversity extinction caused by extreme natural phenomena. Today, many experts…
Bacterial Superbug MRSA Arose in Hedgehogs Long Before the Use of Antibiotics Began
Scientists have found evidence that a type of the antibiotic resistant superbug MRSA arose in nature long before the use of antibiotics in humans and…
How Hydra – A Group of Small Aquatic Animals – Regenerate Their Own Heads
A new paper in Genome Biology and Evolution, published by Oxford University Press, maps out for the first time how Hydra, which are a group of small…