Evolutionary Biology

Books and recommendations from Scientific American

Luck has played a big part in many of the world's great fossil discoveries. New models predict where the bones are and put serendipity in the backseat

English mud captures an ancestral stroll

A species of ant escapes floods on a raft made of its babies

A fallow buck judges a rival's call to tell whether he can be trounced in a mating contest

Kids searching for fossils using SharkFinder kits at Scientific American’s booth at the USA Science & Engineering Festival. Credit: Jason Osborne Jason Osborne was trying to grab a quick lunch away from the crowds when his wife called his cellphone.

Sometimes you never know where your work will end up. Take this figure depicting the evolution of whales that I created for Jerry Coyne’s book, Why Evolution is True.

Elderly men who have lost the Y in blood cells have their lives cut short, compared with men who still have the little chromosome

As I reported in a feature story in Scientific American last December , some fungi have been behaving badly of late, attacking bats, plants, amphibians, reptiles, and people with gusto, driving many species to extinction and others to the brink.

Relying on evidence from Southwestern deserts, a biologist debunks an evolutionary theory that assumes continental sterility for Precambrian life

There have never been enough amphisbaenians on Tet Zoo. In fact, the only time I've written about them at any sort of length is in the 2008 (and 2012) April Fool's article wherein they were convincingly (cough) shown to be the true ancestors of mammals.

The first bees existed around 130 million years ago at a time when our own ancestors were small, ratlike creatures