Evolutionary Biology

California Chrome lacks a prestigious pedigree, but bears genes that make him born to run

While on a family holiday recently I visited Dan yr Ogof, the famous National Show Cave for Wales. Besides being interesting for the expected geological and speleological reasons, Dan yr Ogof is set within landscaped gardens that, bizarrely, feature one of Europe's largest `dinosaur parks'.

“It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.”—Warren Ellis You can find some pretty weird things when you go poking around in holes in remote parts of the globe.

A juvenile tick trapped in a 15-million- to 20-million-year-old piece of amber contains a bacterium that could be the oldest documented ancestor of the microbe that causes Lyme disease

Sometimes research into one question reveals the answer to another. In July 2012 Catherine Hughes and Julie Broken-Brow, students at the University of Queensland in Australia, were in Papua New Guinea studying how the region’s tiny microbats responded to sustainable logging of their forest homes.

Males on two Hawaiian islands simultaneously went mute in just a few years to avoid a parasite

Researchers could tell what sounds blindfolded volunters were hearing by analyzing activity in their visual cortexes. Christie Nicholson reports

 

The feat is a landmark achievement in synthetic biology

CT scans may soon link human remains to missing persons

It’s the first documentation of insects incorporating plastic trash into nests

Yesterday's big reptiles can help us figure out how the human era is shaping up

Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928–May 28, 2014) reading her poem "The Human Family"