Evolutionary Biology

The arguments over an ancient skeleton just won’t die 

How should you treat your ducks? The answer is mired in duckling politics

Something ghostly and hungry flies the skies of northern Australia. Its massive white wings stand out against the darkness as it circles, searching for prey.

The ability to engage in extended hibernation might be what saved ancestral mammals from extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. Karen Hopkin reports

It defies belief, but a 180 million year old fern fossil unearthed in Sweden is so exquisitely preserved that it is possible to see its cells dividing.

We know that octopuses have awesome visual systems and super-sensitive suckers. We have even learned that they can hear. But little scientific attention has been paid to their sense of smell.

Is complex life rare in the cosmos? The idea that it could be rests on the observation that the existence of life like us – with large, energy hungry, complicated cells – may be contingent on a number of very specific and unlikely factors in the history of the Earth.

An analysis of the oldest known DNA from a human reveals a mysterious group that roamed northern Asia

Hey, Darren, how's it going with that plan to discuss all the fossil crocodylomorph groups? Huh? Well, ha ha, it ain't going so well… goddam life getting in the way of my blogging.

Topping out at about 20 kilograms, a coyote has to be able to hunt both smaller and bigger prey, and avoid being prey itself, a combination that selects for intelligence. Steve Mirsky reports

 

Evidence of bony organs in ancient fish suggests that they copulated, although many of their descendants stopped doing so

The movement of lizards around the Caribbean is forcing an accounting for human activity in even the most basic ecological models