A recent study describes a new species of vampyropod based on a 328-million-year-old fossil and pushes back the age of the group by nearly 82 million years. And shows that the oldest ancestors of the…

Was Charles Darwin a one-hit wonder? According to scientists who take a gene’s-eye view of evolution, the 19th-century English naturalist contributed one crucial idea to understanding how species…

Over the course of evolutionary history, Greenlanders have benefited from a genetic variation that offers an incredible advantage; two copies of a gene variant make it so that they absorb sugar…

The ancient relative to modern humans Australopithecus sediba walked like a human, but climbed like an ape, filling in a gap in the fossil record long posited by biologists, finds a new analysis. The…

Microfossils found in rock samples retrieved in Australia more than 60 years ago (DOI 10.1126/science.abj2927) fill an approximately 25-million-year gap in knowledge by reconciling the molecular…

The remains of 36 bubonic plague victims from a 16th century mass grave in Germany provide evidence that evolutionary adaptive processes, driven by the disease, may have conferred immunity on later…

Though modern humans and our closest evolutionary relatives, the great apes, shared a common ancestor millions of years ago, most similarities stop there. We live on the ground, walk on two legs…

A lot has changed since the age of dinosaurs hundreds of millions of years ago. Humans didn't exist and dinosaurs are gone. Yet crocodiles are still here and, unlike humans, have not evolved much by…

An American might ask if the mayonnaise is spicy while an Asian will warn them they only think they want the hot sauce on Asian food. A woman is more likely to be better at detecting bitter tastes…

A new paper finds that mass extinction of land-dwelling animals - amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds- occur in a cycle of about 27 million years. A pattern in nature or just coincidence?…