A dog’s breed contributes a lot to its personality, or so we think. Through history we’ve assigned specific traits and stereotypes to different canine breeds, like aggressiveness to German shepherds and playfulness to golden retrievers. But when it comes to ...
Read More »The secret to these bats’ hunting prowess is deep within their ears
Bats are masters at detecting sound—and a lot of it has to do with the mechanics and structure of those adorably large ears. A set of unique inner ear features may explain how one group of bats evolved the sophisticated ...
Read More »Eating meat may not have been as crucial to human evolution as we thought
The oldest evidence of Homo erectus comes from an arid hillside near the border of Ethiopia and Kenya. Though the 1.9-million-year-old fossil is only a tiny shard, more complete, if more recent individuals show that the species looked recognizably human. ...
Read More »Eastern Africa’s oldest human fossils are more ancient than we realized
A new analysis has pushed the age of the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils from eastern Africa back to more than 230,000 years. The remains, known as Omo I, were discovered in sediments sandwiched between layers of volcanic ash in ...
Read More »These ancient marine reptiles got very big, very fast
About 246 million years ago, a marine reptile roughly the length of a humpback whale patrolled the seas over present-day Nevada. This ichthyosaur wasn’t just remarkable because of its massive size, according to scientists who recently analyzed a partial skeleton ...
Read More »Is it time to change the way we talk about human evolution?
A fossilized skull discovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s should be considered an entirely new species of human, scientists proposed this week in an effort to shed light on the very murky question of what to call our ancient ancestors. ...
Read More »Our four-legged ancestors evolved from sea to land astonishingly quickly
The story of all land animals begins with a squat-limbed, long-bodied swamp fish. Sometime in the steamy mid-Devonian, a family of those fish followed plants and bugs onto land and became the first tetrapods, or four-legged vertebrates. But the fossil ...
Read More »These photos are proof that evolution is wild and wondrous
What can we learn from a zebrafish’s regenerating tail? Or a termite army’s march into uncharted terrain? Welcome to the fields of ecology and evolution, where researchers observe the natural world to better understand how species are shaped by each ...
Read More »The debate over ‘Dragon Man’ shows that human origins are still kind of messy
For more than 80 years, Chris Stringer says a nearly intact, ancient human skull sat at the bottom of a well in Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, China. As the story goes, the specimen was originally unearthed from the bed of ...
Read More »Dire wolves are actually ice age mega-foxes
When you picture a dire wolf, the image that comes to mind is probably one of those unbelievably fluffy yet terrifying creatures that inhabited Winterfell in Game of Thrones. And you’d hardly be the only one, fans of the show ...
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