In his 1879 account of wanderings in the Orient, the travel writer James Hingston describes how, in West Java, he was treated to a bizarre experience: I am taken by my kind host around his garden, and…
Evolution allows animals to develop superb adaptations to survive and flourish in environmental niches. The evolution of fish eyes is one such intriguing example. However, tracing how different kinds of…
Natural selection has shaped many different animal groups, from V-like formations of bird flocks to circular mills of schooling fish. These shapes are the result of millions of years of evolution. Animals…
Sometimes less can be more. Carnivorous pitcher plants from the tropical island of Borneo (Brunei) demonstrate this quite impressively. These plants use funnel-shaped pitfall traps, or pitchers, with slippery…
Species must reproduce to survive, and animals have found unique ways of achieving this. For some, including us, it seems as though producing a few offspring that require extended care is the best strategy…
Invasive species colonize and spread widely in places where they are not normally found. Invasives often affect native species by eating them, out-competing them and introducing unfamiliar parasites and…
Extinct giant kangaroos may have been built more for walking, rather than hopping like today’s kangaroos, especially when moving slowly. These sthenurine kangaroos existed until around 30,000 years ago…
It is a cruel world out there, particularly for young animals born into social groups where infanticide occurs. This dark side of evolution is revealed when adults – often males – kill offspring to promote…
Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, first published in 1859, offered a bold new explanation for how animals and plants diversified and still serves as the foundation underpinning all medical and biological…
Chickens are not fussy eaters. Any object resembling food is worth an exploratory peck. But give a chicken the choice between sugary sweets and seeds, and they will pick the grains every time. This is…
Some species of dinosaur were astoundingly enormous compared to anything alive on land today, which becomes obvious the moment you stand in the shadow of their skeletons in a museum. This remains one reason…
Find yourself thinking that the spider living in your garden is the biggest you’ve ever seen? You could be right. New research shows some spiders are getting larger and even doing better in cities than…
Have you ever wondered why we give birth to live young rather than lay eggs? Scientists have pondered this for a long time and answers have come from an unlikely source: some of Australia’s lizards and…
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…
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…
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…