Gibbons are small, tree-living apes from Southeast Asia, many species of which are endangered. They are part of the same superfamily as humans and great apes, but sit on the divide between Old-World…

New whale research has turned a long-accepted evolutionary assumption on its...hips. Instead of  being just vestigial, whale pelvic bones play a key role in reproduction, according to a new…

The coffee plant has a newly sequenced genome and that can tell scientists what they really want to know about: the evolution of caffeine. The sequences and positions of genes in the coffee plant…

In 1986, an expedition off the South-East coast of Australia near Tasmania, from depths of between 400 and 1,000 metres, brought up some jelly-like creatures, which were seen to be unusual and…

Most living mammals are nocturnal and it has long been thought that the transition to nocturnality occurred at about the same time as mammals evolved, around 200 million years ago. That hypothesis…

Why wild animals genetically changed into domesticated forms has long been a mystery, covered by the blanket artificial selection reasoning. A new paper in Science says that many genes controlling…

Although separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, flies, worms, and humans share ancient patterns of gene expression and it's all in our genomic data. Three related studies in Nature…

Organisms in a symbiotic relationship will often shed genes as they come to rely on the other organism for crucial functions but researchers have uncovered an unusual event in which a bacterium that…

If you capture a hummingbird on high-speed video and slow it down, their wings thrum like helicopter blades as they hover near food. Their hearts beat 20 times a second and their tongues dart 17…

Humans don't want to live above the West Antarctic ice sheet but microbes can certainly live below it, according to a new study. Even half a mile below it. The waters and sediments of a lake 2,600…