Evolutionary Biology

Two years ago, after an intense 13-year quest, scientists concluded that the Formosan clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa brachyura) had gone extinct in Taiwan.

We usually think about male and female mates getting along pretty well (that's `mate' in the biological sense, not your friendly British/ Australian friend).

A new study has revealed how marine pearlfish communicate with each other from the confines of their very safe and comfy homes inside oysters – they use the internal structure of the shell to amplify their strange, pulsing noises to the ocean outside.

Mice that ate their entire food for the day in an eight-to-12-hour window had better markers for health than did mice free to eat whenever they wanted. Steve Mirsky reports
 

Bacteria propel themselves with corkscrew tails anchored in rotary motors. That may seem surprisingly mechanical for a microbe, but it is a system that has been wildly popular and conserved across billions of years of evolution.

It’s no secret: creativity is sexy. People all over the world rank creativity as a highly desirable quality in a partner, and people who are creative across a variety of fields report more sexual partners (similar results have been found in specific fields such as visual art, music, and humor).

The sequencing of genomes of 48 bird species explains the evolutionary roots of vocalization and could offer insight into human speech disorders

Few reptiles can breathe underwater. Australia is home to one of the exceptions, the white-throated snapping turtle (Elseya albagula), which can extract oxygen from water through its backside via a process called cloacal respiration.

In a massive first-of-its-kind whole-genome analysis involving 48 bird species, researchers have created a new avian evolutionary tree. Steve Mirsky reports

 

It’s time again for me to offer up a few quirky gift ideas for the science enthusiasts in your life. I guarantee these will be the most original gifts under the tree!

Edward Wilson has earned the right to title his latest book The Meaning of Human Existence, which coming from almost any other author would sound laughably pretentious.

Once similar to the U.S. Pacific Northwest, Antarctica now demands that life adapt to extreme cold—which explains, for instance, the existence of fish there that make their own antifreeze and lack red blood