Evolutionary Biology

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

Multiple independent gene transfers are now documented to occur in the evolutionary history of eukaryotic life, not just among prokaryotes

Scientists have long thought of the Cambrian Explosion 541 million years ago as the flowering of complex life on Earth. Strangely shaped, large soft-bodied organisms were known to have lived in the period just prior — the Ediacaran — but they made few hard parts and scientists have debated whether any or how many were [...]

The following guest post is by Roy Rinberg, a graduate of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va. and an incoming freshman at New York University. He is co-founder of Project Building Excitement for Science and Technology (BEST), an afterschool program for junior high school students.

Mice infected with the parasites that cause their type of malaria produce odorous compounds that attract mosquitoes, increasing the odds that the parasites will be spread to the next victims
 

While testing crops are legal, it's unlikely farmers will be persuaded to convert to the new bananas without a way to physically sell the fruit

A new theory proposes methane-spurting single-celled organisms were behind the Permian extinctions