Our butts used to be sperm dispensers.
Science Alert reports on an evolutionary study that has found our butts (from which everybody, as the children’s book tells us, poops) were originally a […]
evolution
Intelligence evolved at least twice on Earth.
In science-nerd circles, people lately have been really into talking about how many times crabs evolve — that is, how many unrelated invertebrate families wind […]
Science Art: Cystoidea, by Ernst Haeckel
This is one of the plates from the 100 illustrations in Kunst-Formen der Natur, or “Art Forms in Nature,” by Ernst Haeckel, a scientist – […]
Science Art: Lindblad Travel ad, 1969.
Today, the company that produced this add is known as Lindblad Expeditions, and is so closely associated with National Geographic that it’s often known as […]
Exercise scientists: women hunted, men gathered
Scientific American upends the old idea that manly men evolved to hunt for meat for growing prehistoric families with physiological evidence that women – who […]
Island lizards are evolving – in one year’s time.
Scientific American steps into the fast lane, unexpectedly, on the island of Redonda. People wiped out the local (invasive) populations of rats and goats, and […]
Sigh. Maybe a sweet potato *doesn’t* mean that prehistoric Polynesians visited South America after all.
The Guardian has some sweet potato evolutionary research that unintentionally drives a wedge in the idea that the presence of the humble yam in both […]
Giant genitals were the downfall of some ancient crustaceans
I can’t beat Nature‘s headline, so I won’t even try. “Giant genitals were the downfall of some ancient crustaceans.” The creatures from the Late Cretaceous […]
Science Art: 2014 Evolutionary Biology – Austrian 25 Euro, designed by Helmut Andexlinger.
Click to embiggen Money! Monkey money! This is some currency art done in niobium and silver, honoring the discipline of evolutionary biology. I don’t think […]
Which came first, the sponge or the jelly? (We might have an answer.)
Nature tries to solve a nearly intractable chicken-and-egg problem for evolutionary biologists. Which is the oldest kind of animal, a sponge or a comb jelly? […]
Love and Fitness
PLOS Biology wants us to know that in a cost/benefit analysis, love comes out ahead: A new study published in PLOS Biology by Malika Ihle, […]
Snake vision. We evolved for snake vision.
ScienceDaily keeps an eye out for creepy-crawlies with news that primate vision may have evolved *specifically* to identify snakes: In a paper published Oct. 28 […]
Pitchers tell evolution’s story
Nature draws an ancient lesson from America’s favorite pastime, observing how baseball pitchers reveal the evolution of human beings: “Throwing projectiles probably enabled our ancestors […]
Cars shape sparrows’ evolution.
Nature demonstrates how (possibly) our machines are transforming birds’ whole existence: Roadside-nesting cliff swallows have evolved shorter, more manoeuvrable wings, which may have helped them […]
Slow and steady mutations save the species.
Or at least, Astrobiology says, save the species’ descendants. The secret of survival, on an evolutionary scale, isn’t a single lucky mutant, but a whole […]