Evolutionary Biology

Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson's first glimpse of Lucy came on November 24, 1974

 

Forty years ago today, a young American paleoanthropologist named Donald Johanson made the discovery of a lifetime in the arid badlands of Ethiopia's remote Afar region: a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton of a small-brained creature that walked upright like we do.

You have to hike a pretty long distance if you hope to see the critically endangered bird known as the palila (Loxioides bailleui), but if you’re lucky and work hard, you can walk their entire habitat in a single day.

Importation of a frost-resistant barley from the Fertile Crescent to Tibet some 3,600 years ago is associated with the advent of settlements at 3,000 meters and more above sea level. Cynthia Graber reports

 

Training rescue robots to land safely from falls like cats could give them nine lives in the field. Larry Greenemeier reports

 

Ants—they're everywhere. Charging across your picnic blanket, sneaking into your sandwich and, naturally, marching one by one (hurrah!

I came across these incredible videos by John J. King II (AleutianDream on YouTube) and I just had to share them. These snorkelers are in such close and peaceful contact with wild humpbacks and sperm whales in waters near the Dominican Republic, and Dominica respectively.

New research not only shows the predictive power of symmetry for athletic achievement but is a marker for overall genetic advantage

Scientists will examine the mammoth to learn whether it will yield enough undamaged DNA to make cloning the extinct creature a reality

One of the most spectacular and visually fascinating Tet Zoo-related books of recent-ish months is Chet Van Duzer's Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps, published in 2013 by the British Library.

A nebulous trade in forged and illegal fossils is an ever-growing headache for paleontologists

This last month has been extremely stressful for all of us at Sikundur research station in North Sumatra while we've been following two of our favorite orangutans, Suci and her 3-year-old infant Siboy.