gear Push settings
Cambrian fossil is earliest example of large swimming filter-feeder. An evolutionary explosion Half a billion years ago, the world was extremely different. We’re in the Cambrian, the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era, which lasted from about 541 to 485 million years ago. Life is diversifying at an incredibly fast rate, into what we […]
Researchers have found that a very small portion of your brain plays a key role in decision making. A University of British Columbia study published in Nature Neuroscience says that we need to rethink what we know about the lateral habenula, a region of the brain previously linked to depression and avoidance behaviours; they claim […]
A strange evolutionary alliance between trees and the ants that guard them has a sinister explanation, a new study suggests, after studying ants hooked on nectar. Bodyguard ants and addiction In Central America, ants act as bodyguards for acacia trees, defending them not only from weeds, but also from animals, in exchange for accomodation and […]
It’s amazing how two different animals from two completely different environments evolve some identical physical features. Take bats and dolphins for instance. Both of them use a complex system that produces, receives and process ultrasonic sound waves in order to identify visually hidden objects, track down prey or navigate through obstacles better – typically this […]
Before mobile phones, pagers and computers were born, writing letters were one of the most basic forms of communication. Communication is a vital aspect of a person’s everyday living to be able to convey their thoughts and ideas, to answer queries and everything else that needs to be expressed. Just like every single thing existing […]
Living fossils, fast adapters Sturgeons have been conserved as fossils ever since the early Cretaceous – some 130 million years ago; they are what we call ‘living fossils’. But a new study by University of Michigan researchers revealed that in some aspects, sturgeons are one of the fastest-evolving fish on the planet. “Sturgeon are thought […]
Our general appearance and dominating facial features have come a long way since the days of our early homo sapiens ancestors some hundreds of thousands of years ago. For instance the size of our brain, and of course skull that houses it, has grown in size three times since then. Moreover, medical records only a […]
Psychologists closely studying chimpanzee, bonobo and human infants found striking similarities among the three species in terms of different types of gestures. Their findings seem to back-up the theory that claims language, as we know it, evolved from gesture-based communication first. Panpanzee, a female chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), and Panbanisha, a female bonobo (Pan paniscus) were […]
At 55 million years old, it represents the earliest known member of this broad group of animals that includes humans. It may be no bigger than a mouse, but it is a primate, and a very valuable one at that; paleontologists have named it Archicebus, which roughly translates as “ancient monkey”. The team which described […]
Turtles are maybe the most majestic creatures in the reptile world, and have always been a source of inspiration for man. Everybody knows the fable of the turtle and the hare, which teaches how slow, but sturdy and resilient strides can outwit inconsistent sprints. The turtle’s really serious about it, and as evidence it practices […]
Penguins are remarkable animals that have always garnered attention. For one they’re extremely cute (always an advantage in a world where humans are at the absolute top of the food chain), then they’re extremely fascinating to study. If you’re to closely look at the wings of a penguin, intuition would immediately tell you that these […]
Recently, a big drop in swallow road-kill numbers was observed, without humans changing anything on their part. So biologists set out to see what swallows have been doing differently that allows them to be so much better at avoiding cars. They discovered that roadside nesting cliff swallows have evolved shorter, more manoeuvrable wings that gives […]
A rather well rooted idea in evolutionary biology says that evolution itself is non-reversible. Simply put, once an organism has specialized certain traits, it can not return to its ancestral traits – this is commonly referred to as Dollo’s law. In a way, you could say that by looking at Dollo’s law, evolution isn’t ever […]
Humans were granted with an evolutionary edge that differentiated us from other primates and may have helped us become the dominant species on planet Earth. A recent study which scanned the brains of humans and rhesus monkeys found that humans have at least two functional brain networks absent in rhesus monkeys. Previous genetic research concluded […]
There are millions of species on Earth, and naturally understanding the mechanics of evolution is of great importance for understanding further on what sparks life. What sparks consciousness, well that’s a whole different ball-game. Currently, scientists are concentrating on how diversification occurs in order to better their knowledge of how so many species surfaced along […]
If you’re in a biology class in Europe, and you say that humans appeared on the Earth a few thousand years ago, or that they lived side by side with dinosaurs – you’re gonna get an F. It doesn’t matter if you’re from France, Spain, Russia or Albania, you’re gonna get an F; but in […]
Though Siberia stretches across about 10% of the world’s land surface, it’s only occupied by 0.5% of the world’s population, which isn’t too hard to explain why. Recent temperature measurements read on average -25°C for the month of January, but it’s not unheard of to experience temperatures below -40°C. Extreme weather, temperatures and terrain, however, call […]
According to a new study conducted by Professor Gerald Crabtree, who heads a genetics laboratory at Stanford University in California, humans have peaked their intellectual capacities thousands of years ago, and now we are in a slow, but certain, state of decline. The provocative theory comes from one of the leading minds in genetics, and […]
Back in the prehistoric, and even Antiquity days, man didn’t understand a lot of things; he took every such phenomena and said well, this god did it, or that spirit did it, or some entity did it and that’s just how it goes. Same goes for fossils – whenever somebody stumbled across a fossil, they […]
The origins of vision is a widely debated subject, since genetic relationships between early animals capable of sight are inconsistent. A team of researchers has conducted an extensive computer analysis that tests every proposed hypothesis on the origin of vision to date, and found a common ancestor dating from 700 million years ago. Their findings […]
There are around 800 hermit crab species living in the ocean. These crustaceans like to mind their own business and are rarely seen alongside one another, hence their species’ name. The dozen or so terrestrial hermit crab species, however, are forced to engage socially in order to survive. Their social pattern reveals a selfish agenda, […]
For scientists, the most common method of assessing an animal’s intelligence is by looking at its relative brain size, with respect to its body size. The human brain, for instance, is small compared to other animal’s brain, however it’s exceptionally large when considering our body mass. A new study, which analyzed the relative brain size […]
Researchers have discovered what they believe to be a grandfather of snakes, which descended from terrestrial rather than marine ancestors. “It’s the missing-link snake between snakes and lizards,” says Nicholas Longrich, a postdoctoral fellow in the geology and geophysics department at Yale University and the lead author of a paper published in the journal Nature. […]
Evolution, in very loose lines, is defined as the process which allows a species to survive by passing on the differentiating traits most likely to help offspring adapt to the world through means of natural and sexual selection. Considering the world around us has been shaped so much by human hand, a lot of people […]
Diversity is one of the most shocking aspects when it comes to life on Earth, and knowing how many species walk this planet alongside us is perhaps one of the most important questions in science. However, despite major advancements being made in the field, an answer to that question is still miles away, as efforts […]
Some species of bacteria can survive virtually anywhere: in acids, in nuclear waste, at extremely low or high temperatures, at extreme pressures, and so on; extreme microbes that survive on gases thrown out by Siberian hot springs may have played an extremely important role in the formation of our planet’s atmosphere and its composition, a […]
Over 50 species of pupfish are known from the US to Venezuela, and they are all pretty much the same – except for the ones in two places: the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico and a Caribbean island. Generally speaking, the species of pupfish do the same things. “They look the same and they act the […]
I recently came across this poll, which was conducted about a year ago. Ok, so it’s not extremely actual, but one year can’t change the data significantly. So, almost 1 in 3 Texans believes that humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, and over half of them don’t believe humans evolved from […]
In a recent act that just baffles my mind, Tennesee, not one of the US brightest states, has passed a bill that makes it easier for virtually any creationist teacher to include religion in science class. They did this by including mythology in science classes to promote critical thinking. Now I wonder, do you think […]
It was more than 300 million years ago that reptiles made tracks on earth. The exact moment when this happened is unknown, however; oh, and by exact moment, I’m talking about pinning it down to a couple million years (you gotta love geologists for their sense of time). So, a discovery of fossilized footprints was […]
Researchers from the Scripps Research Institute have determined for the first time that prions, which are just bits of infectious protein without any DNA or RNA that can cause fatal degenerative diseases are capable of Darwinian evolution. This study shows that prions do develop significant large numbers of mutations at a protein level as a […]
The previous 5 mass extinctions wiped out more than three quarters of the world’s animals, and if things continue to move in the same way, the same thing will happen in North America, according to a University of California, Berkeley, and Pennsylvania State University analysis. Numerous scientists have warned that the direction things are moving […]
Remember when we were kids and everyone picked on the ones who looked peculiar in a way or another starting from their hair color and ending with their height? Well, whether you were a “victim” or a “predator” find out that there is a reason why some individuals of a species look at least a […]
The Neanderthal has spakled controversies around scientists for many years, and most questions remain unanswered even today; they had many adaptations to a hard life, such as hort, robust builds, and rather large noses, which show they lived mostly in cold climates. They were almost exclusively carnivorous and top predators and their brains were probably […]
According to a new research, published in PLoS, as the total number of different species in a certain group grows, the chance of the rate of new species apprearing decreases greatly. The research team believes these findings suggest that new species appear less and less as the number of species in a region approaches the […]
Recently, the University of California, Riverside provided some materials that shocked me, to say the least. According to that research, scientists from all around the world have reconstructed changes in Earth’s ancient ocean chemistry during a broad sweep of geological time, from about 2.5 to 0.5 billion years ago. What they found was that the lack of […]
There’s always been a lot of effort put into understanding what (if something) makes humans superior to other man-like mammals. The science world seems to be split into two camps, which can’t agree with each other. Now, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have identified a language feature unique to the […]
Scientists from the University of Bath have revealed what may very well be the first law of evolution, which has a huge importance. The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and it shows the fact that evolution drives animals to become increasingly more complex. They analyzed fossils from the crustacean […]
This dog is famous in the world because it is very big but very gentle – also, thanks to a certain Beethoven movie. The ancestors of the St. Bernard are the herding dogs of Swiss farmers like the Greater Swiss Mountain Dog, as well as hunting dogs and watchdogs. Their history has also been […]
