A bizarre 500-million-year-old “worm with legs” has finally found its rightful place on the evolutionary tree of life. Fossils of Hallucigenia look so odd that scientists couldn’t make head or tail of…
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Articles on Evolution
Displaying 761 - 780 of 995 articles
Premenstral Syndrome (PMS) has been linked to our evolutionary past as a method of dissolving infertile pair bonds. Researchers…
Spectacular transitional fossils, many from northern China, provide overwhelming evidence that dinosaurs evolved into birds and thus didn’t all perish when the deadly meteorite struck at the end of the…
That starling at your birdfeeder? It is a dinosaur. The chicken on your dinner plate? Also a dinosaur. That mangy seagull scavenging for chips on the beach? Apart from being disgusting, yet again it is…
Clues found in mice teeth have helped scientists recreate evolutionary history. Researchers were able to reproduce gradual…
People like to say that we cannot witness evolution because it occurs over timescales immensely greater than our lifetime. That’s incorrect. We can witness evolution all we want, in our lifetime, by watching…
Tropical rainforest flies may be able to evolve and adapt to the effects of climate change. Researchers from Monash University…
Fifty years ago this month, evolutionary biologist William Donald Hamilton published a solution to one of biology’s most enduring mysteries: why does altruism exist? Altruistic behaviours are those where…
Ancient remains have confirmed that the face and jaw evolved before the rest of the skull in Neanderthals and early human ancestors. Research conducted at the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of the Bones) archaeological…
One of the most important questions we can ask – and one that continues to take up much of the time of scientists, philosophers and the religious minded alike – is why are humans so different to the rest…
For a biologist like me, the interesting questions about religion have always been where did it come from and why did it evolve? I taught evolutionary biology in a Catholic University in the most Catholic…
About 6,000 years ago, a bacterium underwent a few genetic changes. These allowed it to expand its habitat from the guts of mice to that of fleas. Such changes happen all the time, but in this particular…
Preserved sperm in a shrimp more than 16 million years old has been discovered in Queensland. The finding marks a breakthrough…
Birds may owe their success to the shrinking bodies of their dinosaur ancestors. An international team, led by paleontologist…
Eyes and wings are among the most stunning innovations evolution has created. Remarkably these features have evolved multiple times in different lineages of animals. For instance, the avian ancestors of…
The Conversation organised a public question-and-answer session on Reddit in which Jeremy Pritchard, senior lecturer in biology at the University of Birmingham, explained the science of evolution and tackled…
In a recent paper in Nature, we described a strange marine animal, called Tamisiocaris. They were giants that swam in the oceans over 500 million years ago. They had strange looking appendages on their…
Zebras’ stripes have baffled biologists since Charles Darwin. Many hypotheses have been proposed regarding their purpose but, despite hundreds of years of study, there remains disagreement. In an attempt…
Writing good science exam questions is hard. Getting the wording right, making sure that what you are asking about is clear, pitching the question at the right level, takes time, lots of experience and…
Australia is world famous for its venomous critters, including its many highly venomous snakes. The snake that holds the popular title of “world’s most venomous” is the inland taipan (Oxyuranus microlepidotus…
Top contributors
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Strategic Professor in Palaeontology, Flinders University
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Scientia Professor of Evolutionary Ecology; Academic Lead of UNSW's Grand Challenges Program, UNSW Sydney
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Professor in Evolutionary Biology (jointly appointed with South Australian Museum), Flinders University
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Honorary Associate Professor, UNSW Sydney
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Senior Lecturer in Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences at the University of Bath, University of Bath
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Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the Milner Centre for Evolution, University of Bath
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Associate Professor, Department of Physiology, Monash University
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Senior Researcher in Vertebrate Palaeontology, University of the Witwatersrand
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Adjunct Research Associate, Monash University
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Jenny Graves is a Friend of The Conversation.
Distinguished Professor of Genetics and Vice Chancellor's Fellow, La Trobe University
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Principal Lecturer in Wildlife Conservation, Nottingham Trent University
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Mark Elgar is a Friend of The Conversation.
Professor of Evolutionary Biology, The University of Melbourne
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Professor of Natural Sciences, UCL
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Senior lecturer, School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, University of Bristol
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Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Evolutionary Ecology, Griffith University
