Evolutionary Biology

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.

Scientific American health and medicine correspondent Dina Fine Maron talks with Armand Sprecher of Doctors Without Borders, who has fought Ebola in Guinea and Liberia. And Steve talks Ebola with Stanford's David Relman, chair of the Forum on Microbial Threats of the Institute of Medicine
 

The island of Madagascar is home to a pretty amazing and diverse collection of geckos, with nearly 70 species from 10 different genera. Now you can add one more species to the list: Paroedura hordiesi, a highly camouflaged nocturnal gecko that was recently discovered in northern Madagascar.

As the European Space Agency’s Philae lander bounced and settled onto the surface of comet 67P/C-G’s crumbly nucleus it wasn’t just space exploration, it was time travel.

Regular readers will know that I have a major interest in ichthyosaurs, the so-called fish-lizards of the Mesozoic (see links below). As you'll know if you keep your finger on the pulse of Mesozoic reptile news, last week saw the publication of a really interesting new animal from the Lower Triassic: the Chinese `proto-ichthyosaur' Cartorhynchus [...]

Though plankton drift with the ocean currents, that doesn’t mean they’re incapable of any movement. Many of them can move to find food or mates, and they do so in some surprising and sometimes entertaining ways.

BERLIN: The former oil shale mining site of Messel, near Frankfurt, Germany, is well known for its spectacular fossils of organisms that lived between 47 million and 48 million years ago, during the Eocene epoch.

Chimps choose an overnight camp site based on the likelihood of finding calorically rich food nearby. Karen Hopkin reports

“To honor a fallen peer and adjust to life outside the war zones, four men linked by combat journey by foot from Washington, D.C., to Pennsylvania.” That is how HBO describes Sebastian Junger’s new documentary, The Last Patrol, which HBO is airing Monday night.

Scientists recently confirmed what anglers have known for centuries—there's something special about a big mama fish. The bigger the fish, the better the bragging rights—and often, the bigger paycheck or prize.

Mexican free-tailed bats make calls that interfere with fellow bats’ echolocation, causing them to miss their insect targets. Christopher Intagliata reports

The homes that animals build are just as much a product of evolution as the creatures themselves