Tunas did not become large, fast and warm-blooded simply because an asteroid cleared the oceans of competing predators. Their defining traits appeared separately over tens of millions of years, ...

In times of environmental upheaval, how do communities of organisms respond? When entire species are wiped out, do surviving species move in and take over, or do new species immigrate to fill the gaps ...

Shortly after an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, life for non-avian dinosaurs ended, but the evolutionary story for the early ancestors of birds began. The fossil record tells us ...

Robots evolve more quickly and efficiently after a virtual mass extinction modeled after real-life disasters such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs. At the start of the simulation, a biped ...

A new study examined how bivalves -- the group that includes clams, mussels, scallops, and oysters -- evolved among many others in the period of rapid evolution known as the Cambrian Explosion. The ...

Last year, hiking in Morocco’s eastern Atlas Mountains, I found an ammonite, a fossil of those spiral-shape cephalopods that to many symbolize paleontology itself. The fossilization process had turned ...

The questions Prof. David Jablonski asks aren’t the little ones. “How do you go from a monkey hanging out in a tree, to an organism who can build electric guitars, and air conditioners, and trains, ...

pt. 1. Beyond the mainland ; 1. Introduction ; 2. History of island studies ; 3. Factors that influence island faunas. Types of islands. Dispersals to islands. The candidate species. Composition of ...

Life changes over time. Of course, it does. We know this thanks to a wealth of converging evidence in the form of millions of fossils, clear genetic clues, and observations made out in the field and ...

This graph plots extinction rates of marine animal families over the last 600 million years. The shaded band indicates the normal range of extinction rates, known as "background extinction." The five ...