In their study,A first-principles model of early evolution: Emergence of gene families, species, and preferred protein folds, Shakhnovich et al present a new model of early biological evolution – the…

A Cornell study of genome sequences in African-Americans, European-Americans and Chinese suggests that natural selection has caused as much as 10 percent of the human genome to change in some…

Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory now reveal that the hypothalamus and its hormones are not purely vertebrate inventions, but have their evolutionary roots in marine, worm-…

A team of American and Irish researchers has concluded that the mysterious appearance in 2001 of an infant female bonnethead shark at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo in a tank that held only two adult…

Although it may sound like an oxymoron, a University of Iowa anthropologist and his colleagues report the first discovery of a skull from a "pygmy-sized" giant panda -- the earliest-known ancestor of…

I took a long weekend so I guess this story is a few days old but I had to relay it because it is so funny! Thanks to Hank Campbell who organizes Scientific Blogging for sending it along. The…

This week's issue of Science has a book review (subscription required unfortunately) of Michael's Behe's latest effort to defend Intelligent Design Creationism. Michael Behe's latest book, The Edge…

It's long been thought that humans hunted woolly mammoths to extinction. Anthropogenic global hunting, as it were. Or that a cataclysmic event did the trick. It may be neither of those and just…

Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara have discovered significant clues to the evolutionary origins of the nervous system by studying the genome of a sea sponge, a member of a…

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that humans’ ability to walk upright developed from ancestors foraging for food in forest tree tops and not from walking on all fours on open land…