Evolution

A paleontologist and an illustrator team up to make mythical creatures follow biomechanical rules

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Video produced in partnership with The Great Courses. All Great Courses video content is available only to subscribers with the password sent via email.

New research tries to tease out whether our closest animal relatives can be selfless

Scientists studied three varieties of house mice and found that those who had lived alongside humans the longest were also the craftiest at solving food puzzles. Christopher Intagliata reports.

Could they speak, too? Did they proposition modern humans in an interspecies creole language?

When the sun disappeared, tiny coccoliths turned to hunting

A Caribbean island’s giant rocks were thought to be deposited by enormous waves

The 9,000-year-old settlement of Çatalhöyük in Turkey shows how humans began putting down roots

Researchers extracted DNA from fossils that are more than a million years old, illuminating the origins of the woolly mammoth and the Columbian mammoth

Persistent rumination may be an attribute that lets us think our way out of despair—a process enhanced through talk therapy

Experiments on clusters of cultured cells hint that a gene variant found only in Homo sapiens profoundly changed brain development in our species, compared with our extinct relatives