Modern cetaceans — which include dolphins, whales and porpoises — are well adapted for aquatic life. They have blubber to insulate and fins to propel and steer.
Selection of new genetic mutations that are beneficial puts some organisms within a population at an advantage compared to others. In some populations, the same beneficial mutation is more likely to take over than in other populations. The population structures that increase the likelihood of the successful takeover are known as "amplifiers of selection," because they enhance the effect of natural selection.
Many lizards are phenomenal climbers.
Sometimes increased evolutionary fitness can be achieved when mistakes are made in the commonly assumed mutational pathways of adaptive DNA mutation. How this occurs is important in understanding what influences evolution and how predictable evolution is.
A nearly complete fossil skeleton 3.67 million years old provides new insight into how the hominin ancestors of man used their arms.
The current prevailing view in biological science is that the DNA of mitochondria, the structures that convert nutrients into cellular energy, is passed on only through maternal inheritance. How this idea came to be, and why it's wrong, is the subject of a review paper by physical anthropologist, Jeffrey H. Schwartz.
An international team of researchers has reconstructed the oldest modern human genome from a human skull found in the modern Czech Republic that is thought to be at least 45,000 years old.
The sweet potato whitefly, Bemisia tabaci, is a costly menace to agricultural crops worldwide, and now researchers have found a possible reason for the whitefly's success: It has found a way to protect itself from the usual plant toxin defense.
Constructive Neutral Evolution (CNE) is a useful concept in the study of evolution that should be better known among molecular and evolutionary biologists, state the authors of a review article on the subject in the Journal of Molecular Evolution, Feb. 19.
An exotic microbe, Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator (CDA), found very deep in the earth on three continents has developed almost identically in each location, with minimal evolution over millions of years.
Contrary to common belief, evolution sometimes produces organisms that are less fit than their distant ancestors.
A new genomic study of how the three orders of amphibians evolved and diverged over millions of years, provides an updated view of amphibian evolutionary discordances, and of the differing explanations of amphibian relationships.
The discovery of terrestrial fungus-like fossils dating back to the end of the Cryogenian ice ages 635 million years ago can provide clues as to how the frozen Earth was able to return to normal and allow life to develop.
Carbon-14 dating of fossil bones is an important tool for a variety of scientific disciplines, yet its inaccuracy is called "the elephant in the room" by an ecologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
How three groups of spitting cobras in different parts of the world independently developed a pain-inducing venom to hurt and blind their predators is an interesting study of convergent evolution.
What drove the explosion of diversity in an East African cichlid freshwater fish that radiated into more than 2,000 species in the last few million years?
European eels have long fascinated biologists because of their complex life cycle and diverse habitats, ranging from above the polar circle to North Africa in the south, the Azores in the west to the Black Sea in the east.
A conceptual framework for examining the role of novelty and innovation in evolution--and their differences--is the subject of a comprehensive article in the journal Biological Reviews, published Aug. 31, 2020.
Discovery of the first fully preserved three-dimensional fossils of tiny animals 547 million years old is helping scientists understand the evolutionary link between the Ediacaran Period and the beginning of the Cambrian, 541 million years ago.
A new study has determined how two distinct orders of the animal kingdom, the extinct Tasmanian tiger and the gray wolf, developed nearly identical skull shapes, a unique example of convergent evolution, the independent development of similar features in non-related animals or plants.