As promised, here is the first post in our “The Student of Life” series. This essay, focusing on the fascinating subject of the shrinkage of our brain over the last 70,000 years, was masterfully penne...

During the civil war in Mozambique, armies hunted African elephants for ivory. That poaching led to an uptick in the number of tuskless animals born.

Why don’t humans have tails? A comparison of the genomes of apes and monkeys has revealed the mutation that caused the ancestors of apes to lose these appendages, a change that did not happen graduall...

Adding mobile DNA sequence to developmental gene short-circuits tail development in mice

A Stanford-led study reveals that rather than evolving gradually over hundreds of millions of years, land plants underwent major diversification in two dramatic bursts, 250 million years apart. The fi...

Royal Ontario Museum paleontologists unearth one of the largest radiodonts of the Cambrian explosion. Paleontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) have uncovered the remains of a huge new fossil ...

The semiaquatic whale walked on land and swam in water.

Genetic effects associated with same-sex sexual behavior are also associated with a mating advantage among people who engage only in opposite-sex sexual behavior, according to a study involving partic...

One of the biggest questions in evolution is when and how major groups of animals first evolved. The rise of tetrapods (all limbed vertebrates) from their fish relatives marks one of the most importan...