Category Archives: Latest on Evolution

In saliva, clues to a ‘ghost’ species of ancient human

In saliva, scientists have found hints that a "ghost" species of archaic humans may have contributed genetic material to ancestors of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa today. The research adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that sexual rendezvous between different archaic human species may not have been unusual. Past studies have concluded that…

DNA solves ancient animal riddle that Darwin couldn’t

After the last of its kind died out about 12,000 years ago, a strange animal that stumped Charles Darwin is finally being added to the tree of life, according to a new study in the journal Nature Communications. Macrauchenia patachonica lived during the last ice age. It resembled a bulky camel without a hump, with…

Genetic analysis of New World birds confirms untested evolutionary assumption

Biologists have always been fascinated by the diversity and changeability of life on Earth and have attempted to answer a fundamental question: How do new species originate? An implicit assumption in the discipline of speciation biology is that genetic differences between populations of animals and plants in a given species are important drivers of new…

World’s best-preserved armoured dinosaur revealed in all its bumpy glory

On the afternoon of March 21, 2011, a heavy-equipment operator named Shawn Funk was carving his way through the earth, unaware that he would soon meet a dragon. That Monday had started like any other at the Millennium Mine, a vast pit some 17 miles north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, operated by energy company Suncor.…

Oldest evidence of life on land found in 3.48 billion-year-old Australian rocks

Fossils discovered by UNSW scientists in 3.48 billion year old hot spring deposits in the Pilbara region of Western Australia have pushed back by 580 million years the earliest known existence of microbial life on land. Previously, the world's oldest evidence for microbial life on land came from 2.7- 2.9 billion-year-old deposits in South Africa…

Curiouser and Curiouser–Octopus’s Evolution Is Even Stranger Than Thought

As if octopuses, squids and other cephalopods were not already strange enough, they may have found a way to evolve that is foreign to practically all other multicellular organisms on the planet. For most animals, changes that might prove beneficial to the organism primarily occur at the beginning of their molecular production process. Mutations occur…

Microbes evolved to colonize different parts of the human body

As the human species evolved over the last six million years, our resident microbes did the same, adapting to vastly different conditions on our skin and in our mouths, noses, genitalia and guts. A team of Duke University scientists has tracked how this microbial evolution unfolded, using mathematical tools originally developed for geologists. The scientists…

Metabolism may be older than life itself and start spontaneously

A set of chemical reactions occurring spontaneously in Earth’s early chemical environments could have provided the foundations upon which life evolved. The discovery that a version of the Krebs cycle, which occurs in most living cells, can proceed in the absence of cellular proteins called enzymes suggests that metabolism is older than life itself. Metabolism…

Ancient, scary and alien-looking specimen forms a rarity in the insect world — a new order

Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered a 100-million-year-old insect preserved in amber with a triangular head, almost-alien and "E.T.-like" appearance and features so unusual that it has been placed in its own scientific "order" -- an incredibly rare event. There are about 1 million described species of insects, and millions more still to be…

A Break in the Search for the Origin of Complex Life

In Norse mythology, humans and our world were created by a pantheon of gods who lived in the realm of Asgard. As it turns out, these stories have a grain of truth to them.Thanks to a team of scientists led by Thijs Ettema, Asgard is now also the name of a large clan of microbes.…