Team explains how dinosaurs rose to prominence
A shade more than 200 million years ago, the Earth looked far different than it does today. Most land on the planet was consolidated into one continent called Pangea. There was no Atlantic Ocean, and...
View ArticleFish out of water: Gene clue to evolutionary step
Two genes controlling a tissue protein may have played a role in the key period when fish shed their fins and became limbed land-lovers, a study published by Nature on Thursday said.
View ArticleResearchers provide new understanding of bizarre extinct mammal
University of Florida researchers presenting new fossil evidence of an exceptionally well-preserved 55-million-year-old North American mammal have found it shares a common ancestor with rodents and...
View ArticleFirst great predator not much of one at all
The meters-long, carnivorous "shrimp" from hell that once ruled the seas of Earth a half billion years ago may have been a real softy, it turns out. A new 3-D modeling of the mouth parts of the...
View ArticleNew statistical model moves human evolution back 3 million years
Evolutionary divergence of humans from chimpanzees likely occurred some 8 million years ago rather than the 5 million year estimate widely accepted by scientists, a new statistical model suggests.
View ArticleScientists announce discovery of first horned dinosaur from South Korea
Scientists from South Korea, the United States and Japan analyzed fossil evidence found in South Korea and published research describing a new horned dinosaur. The newly identified genus, Koreaceratops...
View ArticleFossil finger bone yields genome of a previously unknown human relative (w/...
(PhysOrg.com) -- A 30,000-year-old finger bone found in a cave in southern Siberia came from a young girl who was neither an early modern human nor a Neanderthal, but belonged to a previously unknown...
View ArticleGenetic analysis finds that modern humans evolved from southern Africa's Bushmen
A team of Stanford University scientists, using the largest-ever genetic analysis of remote tribal people, have determined that the human family tree is rooted in one of the world's most marginal and...
View ArticleEvolution of human 'super-brain' tied to development of bipedalism, tool-making
Scientists seeking to understand the origin of the human mind may want to look to honeybees -- not ancestral apes -- for at least some of the answers, according to a University of Colorado Boulder...
View ArticleAncient bacterial mats may have been key to first mobile animals
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from Canada studying the highly salty coastal lagoons at Los Roques, Venezuela and the microbial mats found at the bottom of the sea there, have discovered that oxygen...
View ArticleFarming to blame for our shrinking size and brains
(PhysOrg.com) -- At Britain's Royal Society, Dr. Marta Lahr from Cambridge University's Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies presented her findings that the height and brain size of...
View ArticleEarly cretaceous birds with crops found in China
The crop is characteristic of seed-eating birds today, yet little is known about its early history despite remarkable discoveries of many Mesozoic seed-eating birds in the past decade. Scientists from...
View ArticleResearch team finds new explanation for Cambrian explosion
(PhysOrg.com) -- For hundreds of years, researchers from many branches of science have sought to explain the veritable explosion in diversity in animal organisms that started approximately 541 million...
View Article'Animal embryo' fossils are actually microbes (Update)
Tiny fossils that scientists have thought for decades were the embryos of the earliest animals ever found have turned out to be the remains of much simpler microbial organisms.
View ArticleCompetition is at the root of diversity in rainforests: study
Another attractive theory falls foul of the facts. A census of trees in rainforests on three continents has confirmed that competition plays a central role in structuring communities. This contradicts...
View ArticleNamibia sponge fossils are world's first animals: study
Scientists digging in a Namibian national park have uncovered sponge-like fossils they say are the first animals, a discovery that would push the emergence of animal life back millions of years.
View ArticleDesert footprints reveal ancient origins of elephants' social lives
(PhysOrg.com) -- A cluster of ancient footprints in the Arabian desert offers the clearest evidence yet for the early origins of modern elephants social structure, according to a Yale-led research team.
View ArticleFossil finds help fill in Romer's Gap
(PhysOrg.com) -- A collection of new fossil finds in Scotland that date back to the 15 million year period between 345 and 360 million years ago are helping to fill the almost blank fossil record...
View ArticleMini-mammoths lived on Crete: scientists (w/ Video)
(Phys.org) -- The smallest mammoth known to have ever lived has been identified by Natural History Museum scientists, and is reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B today.
View ArticleScientist: Evolution debate will soon be history
(AP) -- Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history. Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself.
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