With their stretched bodies, immense wingspan and iridescent coloring, dragonflies are a unique sight.
Skilfully manufactured slate ring ornaments were fragmented on purpose, using pieces of rings as tokens.
Our understanding of the prehistory of the Finnish language is becoming clearer
The human brain is 238% larger than any other primate of similar body mass. How evolution brought about this situation has been a focus of physical anthropologists for more a century.
As mountain ecosystems are natural laboratories of global change due to their strong climatic gradients, they continue to be important ecosystems for climate change impact studies.
All organisms have some portion of their DNA that does not code for proteins, but the amounts vary greatly. Bacteria average about 2% non-coding DNA, while in humans the non-coding DNA comes to 98% of the total.
Whether nectar-sucking butterflies or blood-sucking mosquitoes - the ingestion of liquid food has long been known for many insects and other arthropods.
Scientists analysing one of the largest genomic datasets of plants have discovered how the first plants on Earth evolved the mechanisms used to control water and ‘breathe’ on land hundreds of millions of years ago.
A Mount Holyoke College geologist looking for ornamental garden stones, chanced upon a dark-colored fossil bone, which he later identified as the distal (outer) end of the right humerus (long upper-arm) of a large neotheropod. The bone dates to the Lower Jurassic period, between 201 million and 174.1 million years ago.
Addressing one of the most profoundly unanswered questions in biology, a Rutgers-led team has discovered the structures of proteins that may be responsible for the origins of life in the primordial soup of ancient Earth.The study appears in the journal Science Advances.The researchers explored how primitive life may have originated on our planet from simple, non-living materials.
Researchers have completed a comprehensive analysis of the head width of over 1,500 species of termites and determined that their size isn’t gradually shrinking at a geological timescale.
Most birds aren’t as colorful as parrots or peacocks. But if you look beyond the feathers, bright colors on birds aren’t hard to find: Think pink pigeon feet, red rooster combs and yellow pelican pouches.
Researchers at the Universities of Helsinki and Lyon and the Geological Survey of Finland found that complex teeth, a hallmark of mammals, also evolved several times in reptiles, prompting the evolutionary success of plant-eating lizards. However, contrary to mammals their tooth evolution was not unidirectional.
Lund University has issued the following press release: Our DNA is very similar to that of the chimpanzee, which in evolutionary terms is our closest living relative.
Press release: Trilobites of the suborder Phacopina had a unique eye in which about 200 large lenses in each eye spanned at least six individual facets, each of which in turn formed its own small compound eye / 40-year-old X-ray photographs by amateur paleontologist Wilhelm Stürmer show fossilized eye nerves.
A new study suggests that all living snakes evolved from a handful of species that survived the giant asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs and most other living things at the end of the Cretaceous.
A family of fishes, called the cichlids, in Africa’s Lake Malawi is helping researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to refine our understanding of how evolution works.
Fossils of ancient viruses are preserved in the genomes of all animals, including humans, and have long been regarded as junk DNA. But are they truly junk, or do they actually serve a useful purpose?
A botanist and a psychologist have put forward a highly novel theory of the circadian clock based on the integration of bioelectric time-sensing mechanisms in individual cells and parts of cells.
How life originated on Earth is a complex question that has been the subject of inquiry for hundreds of years by curious individuals as well as specialists in science, religion, and philosophy.