Evolution

Like Having 4 Limbs? Thank Your Belly

Backboned animals, at least the ones with jaws, have four fins or limbs, one pair in front and one pair behind. Thanks to that random prankster known as evolution, these have been modified into a marvelous variety of fins, legs, arms, flippers, and wings. ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 27 2014 - 5:46pm

Sneezing Sponges! Did They Evolve Noses?

Evolutionary biology sounds exciting- there wouldn't be any movies on the SyFy Channel without Gatoroids and Sharknados and other feats of life science run amok- but in reality you are going to spend a lot of time paying your dues watching sponges in ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Feb 7 2014 - 12:32pm

How Did Vertebrates Evolve A Face?

How did we evolve a face? Vertebrates, backboned animals, come in two basic models: jawless and jawed.  Jawed vertebrates, including us, number over 50,000 species but there are two jawless vertebrates in existence today; lampreys and hagfishes. It is kno ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 12 2014 - 5:44pm

Is Kleiber's Law The Geometry Of Evolution?

A mouse's heart beats about the same number of times in its lifetime as an elephant's, but a mouse only lives for about a year while an elephant will live to be about 70. Why do small plants and animals mature faster than large ones? Why has nat ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 18 2014 - 11:57am

Life Developed 3.6 Billion Years Ago- Then Evolution Got Stuck In Slime

The first life developed in ancient oceans some 3.6 billion years ago, but then nothing much happened. For a billion years, we remained pretty much a layer of slime.  Then 550 million years ago, evolution came roaring back and here we are today. So what w ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 27 2014 - 11:25pm

Not Just Males: Common Ancestor Of Modern Songbirds Had Female Song

Evolutionary biologists have long considered bird song to be an exclusively male trait, resulting from sexual selection. A new paper says that's not the whole story. The results of their analysis, now published in Nature Communications, showed that t ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 5 2014 - 4:20pm

Astrobiology: A Model For How Cell Metabolism Began

Cell metabolism is a crucial biological function for all living organisms but understanding how life may have emerged is difficult. And learning some answers may make it possible to learn whether it is possible for life to have emerged in similar environm ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 13 2014 - 12:24am

For The Last 600 Million Years, The Sea Anemone Has Been Genetically Half Animal, Half Plant

A new study finds that sea anemones display a genomic landscape with a complexity of regulatory elements similar to that of fruit flies or other animal model systems, which suggests that this principle of gene regulation is already 600 million years old a ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 18 2014 - 10:46am

New Zealand Moa Were Fine Until Humans Arrived

Humans didn't cause problems for everything we get blamed for but DNA evidence in a paper suggests that the ancient New Zealand megaherbivore, moa, a distant relative of the Australian Emu, did go extinct shortly after Polynesians arrived  in the lat ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 19 2014 - 9:41am

Limb Bone Marrow Evidence In Fin Of 370 Million Year Old Fish

Researchers have found the earliest fossil evidence for the presence of bone marrow in the fin of a 370 million-year-old fish, Eusthenopteron, a Devonian lobe-finned fish from Miguasha in Canada that is closely related to the first tetrapods. ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 19 2014 - 10:44am