Evolutionary Biology

No time to finish anything new, gah. In desperation, here’s a classic article from the Tet Zoo archives, originally published in March 2009.

High terrains might have been the training ground for cold adaptation before the Ice Age struck

Some say that the differences between boys and girls are just aping nature, but studies of primates tell a more complex story "Boys will be boys" is a popular refrain in schools.

It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for… stem-pinnipeds at Tet Zoo. Or, probable stem-pinnipeds anyway. This minimum-effort post is brought to you on the back of work showing that pinnipeds (seals, sea lions and walruses) are monophyletic, not diphyletic, and that the taxa shown here – Potamotherium, Puijila and so on – really are [...]

Growing up, I felt certain that grass and most trees did not have flowers. They just had leaves and seeds — that was all I could see, anyway.

In order to avoid predators, scarlet kingsnakes in North Carolina have evolved to more closely resemble a poisonous lookalike no longer found in the area

It's not easy to study a whale vagina. But it is necessary. Right now, penises get far more attention than vaginas in the science world. (It's also apparent in the museum scene, too—sadly, today, there's no vagina equivalent to rival the Icelandic Phallocological Museum).

Receding glaciers at the end of the last ice age led to the flightless birds' move to the Crozet Islands

Life is tough if you’re a northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus). These rare, cat-sized Australian marsupials don’t have very long life spans—especially males, which tend to die after their first mating experience when less than a year old.

I have a prediction. There is a scientific hypothesis, formulated over 20 years ago, that we will one day look back on, when the evidence is in, and say “Of course that was right!

Is de-extinction a real possibility?