Northern seals use strong claws to tear apart large prey and this gives us clues about how the earliest seals likely behaved when they first began feeding in water.
A honeybee (left), a scarab beetle (middle), and a fly (right) feeding on flowers of the white rock rose in a Mediterranean scrubland.
Aphrodite Kantsa.
Rather than trying to out-compete each other, flowers may work together to attract bees en masse. It’s the sort of approach that is effective in the world of advertising too.
The way we move our eyebrows can help us to communicate.
Pexels
Dogs don’t follow the rules on larger animals living longer. A 70kg Great Dane is lucky to reach seven years, but a 4kg Chihuahua can live for 10 years or more.
Paleoloxodon antiquus has been extinct for 120 000 years.
By Apotea (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
A core idea in molecular biology is that one gene codes for one protein. Now biologists have found an example of a gene that yields two forms of a protein – enabling it to evolve new functionality.
The genes in our cells’ mitochondria are passed on in a different way than the vast majority of our DNA. New studies shed light on how the unique process isn’t derailed by mutations.
Some people thought Charles Darwin was suggesting that, over a very long period of time, apes turned into people. He was not.
Flickr/Ronald Woan
The short answer is no. An individual of one species cannot, during its lifetime, turn into another species. But your question helps us think about life, evolution and what it means to be human.
Cross-sections of the spermatozoa of the Monogene Chimaericola leptogaster as seen under an electron microscope.
Jean-Lou Justine
Australia’s credit reporting system is about to be updated, and new research shows it’s past due. The current system simply doesn’t provide either lenders or borrowers with enough information.
Many living vertebrates have the ability to detect electric fields, especially in other animals when hunting. But what can the fossil record tell us about the origins of this sensory system?
Tiktaalik: bridging the gap between land and sea.
Zina Deretsky/National Science Foundation
Rolf Quam, Binghamton University, State University of New York
New discoveries are changing archaeologists’ ideas about the origins of our own species and our migration out of Africa. This fossil pushes Homo sapiens’ African exodus date back by 50,000 years.