Category Archives: Latest on Evolution

New study hints at spontaneous appearance of primordial DNA

The self-organization properties of DNA-like molecular fragments four billion years ago may have guided their own growth into repeating chemical chains long enough to act as a basis for primitive life, says a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of University of Milan. While studies of ancient mineral formations contain…

The 100 million year-old piggyback: Amber reveals earliest example of maternal care in insects

Scientists have uncovered the earliest fossilized evidence of an insect caring for its young. The findings, published in the journal eLife, push back the earliest direct evidence of insect brood care by more than 50 million years, to at least 100 million years ago when dinosaurs dominated the earth. The new fossil is the only…

8 Incredible Facts You May Not Know About Human Evolution

Homo sapiens evolved about 200-150,000 years ago in Africa, but our story as a species stretches back much further than that with early human ancestors. And the evolution of Homo sapiens is itself a tangled tale, full of unanswered questions and gothic family melodrama. Here are a few facts you may not know about the…

Puzzle of Darwin’s ‘strangest animals’ finally solved

Charles Darwin called them perhaps the “strangest animal[s] ever discovered.” And evolutionary biologists have puzzled ever since over where to place certain odd-looking extinct South American hooved animals in the mammalian branches of the tree of life. Now, new molecular evidence from proteins preserved in fossilized bones reveals that the mammals—includingMacrauchenia, a leggy animal that…

Some genes ‘foreign’ in origin and not from our ancestors

Many animals, including humans, acquired essential 'foreign' genes from microorganisms co-habiting their environment in ancient times, according to research published in the open access journal Genome Biology. The study challenges conventional views that animal evolution relies solely on genes passed down through ancestral lines, suggesting that, at least in some lineages, the process is still…

Earliest Human Species Possibly Found in Ethiopia

An ancient jawbone fragment is the oldest human fossil discovered yet, a bone potentially from a new species that reveals the human family may have arose a half million years earlier than previously thought, researchers say. This find also sheds light on the kind of landscape where humans first originated, scientists added. Although modern humans…

A French-Kenyan research team has just described a new fossil ancestor of today's hippo family. This discovery bridges a gap in the fossil record separating these animals from their closest modern-day cousins, the cetaceans. It also shows that some 35 million years ago, the ancestors of hippos were among the first large mammals to colonize…

‘Shadow biosphere’ might be hiding strange life right under our noses

If we came across alien life, would we even know it was alive? That was a central question posed at a session here yesterday at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes Science). All known life on Earth fits a particular mold, but life from other planets might break free from that mold, making it…

How Earth’s earliest life overcame a genetic paradox

On ancient Earth, the earliest life encountered a paradox. Chains of RNA—the ancestor of DNA—were floating around, haphazardly duplicating themselves. Scientists know that eventually, these RNA chains must have become longer and longer, setting the stage for the evolution of complex life forms like amoebas, worms, and eventually humans. But under all current models, shorter…

Fossil ankles indicate Earth’s earliest primates lived in trees

Earth's earliest primates have taken a step up in the world, now that researchers have gotten a good look at their ankles. A new study has found that Purgatorius, a small mammal that lived on a diet of fruit and insects, was a tree dweller. Paleontologists made the discovery by analyzing 65-million-year-old ankle bones collected…