Evolutionary Biology

A new arachnid family tree suggests that many spider species evolved away from web-weaving

“Wheat P1210892” by Copyright © 2007 David Monniaux – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Yesterday scientitsts announced in a quartet of papers in the journal Science that the draft genome of bread wheat — Triticum aestivum — had been decoded and mapped.

A preliminary map of the bread wheat genome includes the locations of more than 75,000 genes. Cynthia Graber reports 

 

Microbes live in dense and diverse communities. There are billions of bacteria from thousands of species living together in your gut or in the soil.

Joy Reidenberg, comparative anatomist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, talks about her new PBS series Sex in the Wild, about the sex lives of elephants, orangutans, kangaroos and dolphins. The series debuts July 16, 2014

Last month forest rangers in India arrested a 21-year-old engineering student and his friend who had been caught carrying a tiger skin that they intended to sell for nearly $25,000.

Conservation may be important for human health

Describing a new species for science is not quite as easy as it was in the days of 17th- or 18th-century naturalists. But that just means we have to look a little more closely.

Researchers attempt to puzzle out how Earth got its ice caps

http://www.pensoft.net/news.php?n=394&SESID=5eebde6fd8471b050adfb405b7a280b9 http://www.pensoft.net/journals/zookeys/article/7730/integrative-revision-of-the-giant-pill-millipede-genus-sphaeromimus-from-madagascar-with-the%C2%A0description-of-seven-new-s

If, as I have, you've spent copious time wandering the British countryside, visiting amusement parks and visitor attractions that feature life-sized `prehistoric animals', you'll surely have seen all those Phorusrhacos* models.

Reef-building in skeletal animals appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than previously thought, as far back as 548 million years ago