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A new family tree of apes that lived in the Miocene between 23 and 5.3 million years ago reveals which are our close relatives and which are only distant cousins Humans 16 March 2022 By Michael Marshall Dryopithecus, an extinct ape from the Miocene JOHN SIBBICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY A huge study of fossil apes clarifies … Read more
People have been trying to understand how predators and prey are able to stay balanced within our planet’s ecosystems for at least 2,400 years. The Greek author Herodotus even raised the question in his historical treatise Histories, written around 430 BC. And when Charles Darwin published in 1859 his revolutionary theory of evolution in … Read more
The timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic has been marked by a series of catastrophic waves: surging crests of infection spreading around the world, often spearheaded by newly evolved variants of the pathogen, such as Delta and Omicron. This is simply how viral evolution can play out, of course. But SARS-CoV-2 is an unusually successful … Read more
In 2019, Alessandra Mascaro, a volunteer and budding evolutionary biologist for The Loango Chimpanzee Project, noticed something no other primatologist in Africa had reported before. In the forests of Gabon, while following and filming a female chimpanzee Suzee and her son Sia, Mascaro noticed Suzee clamp something tiny between her lips, before applying the … Read more
Our planet’s convoluted history of evolving life has spawned countless weird and wonderful creatures, but none excite evolutionary biologists – or divide taxonomists – quite like crabs. When researchers attempted to reconcile the evolutionary history of crabs in all their raucous glory just earlier this year, they arrived at the conclusion that the defining … Read more
A rare and exquisitely preserved dinosaur embryo tucked inside an egg like a baby bird has been unearthed in southern China, providing an “unprecedented glimpse” into dinosaur development. With a posture that resembles modern bird embryos close to hatching, the fossilized embryo is a remarkable find which raises the possibility that evolutionary links between … Read more
Spiraling fractal branches draw connections between a staggering 2.2 million living species on Earth in the most comprehensive tree of life ever created. “It allows people to find their favorite living things, be they golden moles or giant sequoias, and see how evolutionary history connects them together to create a giant tree of all life … Read more