We all know the story: Once upon a time there was a young girl who took a walk through the woods to visit her grandmother, carrying a basket of goodies. When she arrived she found her granny ill in bed…
Penguins are a remarkable group of flightless birds. We tend to think of them as Antarctic birds, but they actually inhabit an extremely diverse range of habitats from subzero Antarctic coastline to the…
A new study by Rebecca Pian, Mike Archer and Sue Hand, published today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, describes the tooth of a new, giant species of extinct platypus. The fossil history of…
There was no concept of biological species before the late 17th century in natural history. So why did we get a concept of species in the first place? What is “species” needed for? The answer is that the…
Hummingbird-pollinated flowers evolved perfectly to suit the bird’s bill shape, its colour vision and even its taste buds. This is the beauty of co-evolution, where two species interact so closely that…
The often remade song “He Ain’t Heavy… He’s My Brother” probably owes a good deal of its enduring popularity to its depiction of the loving familial bond between two siblings - one aiding the other despite…
Val Curtis, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
If you read about the record-breaking “fatberg” lurking under Kingston recently and reacted the same way as me - “Oh my God - a gob of fat in the London sewers as big as a bus - that’s disgusting!” - you’ll…
Charles Darwin famously drew upon Thomas Malthus’s treatise on human population growth to build his theory of evolution by natural selection. Malthus was worried about the rising population of the lower…
The sudden appearance of a range of modern animals about half a billion years ago, during evolution’s “big bang”, has intrigued and puzzled generations of biologists from Charles Darwin onwards. A new…
The Silk Road snaked across continents for more than a thousand years, shaping civilisations in East and West. Famously trodden by Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, the trade route brought riches to…
Ever since the Neandertal (Homo neanderthalensis) type fossil was discovered in the Neander Valley of Germany in 1856, the species has been variously portrayed as knuckle-dragging cavemen and primitive…
We all know that weather is not the same as climate, but it is surprising how our perceptions of global warming vary according to what we see outside our window. In the UK for example, last year’s washed-out…
The DNA of Albert Perry may change the story of human origins. Perry was an African-American born into slavery in South Carolina. An analysis of the DNA of his descendants produced results that came as…
Dinosaurs were the largest animals to ever walk Earth, and they ruled the planet for more than 160 million years. The long-necked Argentinosaurus, with back vertebrae almost two metres high, possibly grew…
Wisdom teeth, the palmaris longis tendon, ear wiggling: these qualities were desirable millions of years ago, but due to changes in our diet and environment, are slowly disappearing. However, such features…
In our everyday lives we constantly compare things. We care about whether we are better or worse off than others around us, or than we were in the past. Why we do this has long puzzled scientists, because…
Fossilised soft tissues, such as skin and muscle, are exceptionally hard to come by. When you think the chances of an animal being fossilised is less than one in a million - and these usually have only…
Do chimpanzees and bonobos throw tantrums when their decision-making fails to pay off? That’s the question posed in a new PLoS ONE study by Brian Hare of Duke University and Alexandra Rosati of Yale. It…