Death is inevitable for individuals and also for species. With help from the fossil record, paleontologists are piecing together what might make one creature more vulnerable than another.
Was Darwin inspired by the tropical wildlife of his travels to discover natural selection? Actually, pigeons, worms and barnacles were far more prominent in his thinking.
An evolutionary biologist visits the remote jungle mountaintop where a little-known naturalist wrote his insightful paper about the mechanisms of evolution that spurred on a rivalrous Charles Darwin.
Bees and wasps can recognise people’s faces – despite having less than one million brain cells, compared to 86,000 million brain cells that make up a human brain.
Strange frond-like sea creatures are among the planet’s earliest animals, but new research dates them and the entire animal kingdom to much earlier than first thought.
We know of about 900 valid dinosaur species that existed. ‘Valid’ means scientists know the dinosaur from enough of the skeleton bones to feel pretty sure that it differs from other known dinosaurs.
Rivers are natural boundaries for evolving populations. But scientists don’t agree whether they create new species or just help maintain them. Research using birds’ molecular clocks provides some answers.
In the wake of two hurricanes in the Turks and Caicos Islands, researchers document for the first time that catastrophic storms can be agents of natural selection, influencing how species evolve.
What drives the emergence and disappearance of species? By modeling the fundamental processes of evolution and ecology on geographical scales, new research spotlights topography and climatic shifts.