Evolutionary Biology News

April 19, 2024

Top Headlines

Mountain Chickadees Have Remarkable Memories. A New Study Explains Why

Apr. 17, 2024 — Mountain chickadees have among the best spatial memory in the animal kingdom. New research identifies the genes at play and offers insight into how a shifting climate may impact the evolution of this unique ...

Seed Ferns: Plants Experimented With Complex Leaf Vein Networks 201 Million Years Ago

Apr. 16, 2024 — According to a research team led by palaeontologists, the net-like leaf veining typical for today's flowering plants developed much earlier than previously thought, but died out again several times. ...

Twisted Pollen Tubes Induce Infertility

Apr. 16, 2024 — Plants with multiple sets of chromosomes, known as polyploids, are salt-tolerant or drought-resistant and often achieve higher yields. However, newly formed polyploid plants are often sterile or have reduced fertility and are unsuitable for breeding ...

Evolution's Recipe Book: How 'Copy Paste' Errors Cooked Up the Animal Kingdom

Apr. 15, 2024 — A series of whole genome and gene duplication events that go back hundreds of millions of years have laid the foundations for tissue-specific gene expression, according to a new study. The ...

Latest Headlines

updated 12:52pm EDT

Millions of Gamers Advance Biomedical Research

Apr. 15, 2024 — 4.5 million gamers around the world have advanced medical science by helping to reconstruct microbial evolutionary histories using a minigame included inside the critically and commercially ...

How Seaweed Became Multicellular

Apr. 12, 2024 — A deep dive into macroalgae genetics has uncovered the genetic underpinnings that enabled macroalgae, or 'seaweed,' to evolve multicellularity. Three lineages of macroalgae developed multicellularity ...

Oxidant Pollutant Ozone Removes Mating Barriers Between Fly Species

Apr. 11, 2024 — Researchers show that ozone levels, such as those found in many places on hot summer days today, destroy the sex pheromones of fruit fly species. As a result, some natural mating boundaries ...

Geobiology: New Placozoan Habitat Discovered

Apr. 11, 2024 — Traces of DNA in the stomachs of predatory snails give a team og geobiologists new insights into the ecology of ...

3D Mouth of an Ancient Jawless Fish Suggests They Were Filter-Feeders, Not Scavengers or Hunters

Apr. 10, 2024 — Early jawless fish were likely to have used bony projections surrounding their mouths to modify the mouth's shape while they collected food. Experts ...

Birdfeeders Are Designed to Keep Unwanted Guests Away

Apr. 9, 2024 — The first birdfeeders were made in the 19th century, and their design rapidly evolved during the 20th century. Researchers at the consider the evolution of the birdfeeder to be an example of ...

Mediterranean Marine Worm Has Developed Enormous Eyes

Apr. 8, 2024 — Scientists are amazed at the discovery of a bristle worm with such sharp-seeing eyes that they can measure up to those of mammals and octopuses. The researchers suspect that these marine worms may ...

Toothed Whale Echolocation Organs Evolved from Jaw Muscles

Apr. 8, 2024 — Genetic analysis finds evidence suggesting that acoustic fat bodies in the heads of toothed whales were once the muscles and bone marrow of the ...

The Life Aquatic: A Game Changer for Frog Vision, but Little Difference Between Night and Day

Apr. 4, 2024 — Frogs display a remarkable diversity of species as a whole, but does the same hold true for their visual abilities? A new study sought to answer this ...

First View of Centromere Variation and Evolution

Apr. 3, 2024 — A genomic study of human and selected nonhuman primate centromeres has revealed their unimaginable diversity and speed of evolutionary change. Although centromeres are vital to proper cell ...

Reproductive Success Improves After a Single Generation in the Wild for Descendants of Some Hatchery-Origin Chinook Salmon

Apr. 16, 2024 — Researchers who created 'family trees' for nearly 10,000 fish found that first-generation, wild-born descendants of hatchery-origin Chinook salmon in an Oregon river show improved ...

In the Evolution of Walking, the Hip Bone Connected to the Rib Bones

Apr. 5, 2024 — A new reconstruction of the 375-million-year-old fossil fish Tiktaalik -- a close relative of limbed vertebrates -- used micro-CT to reveal bones still embedded in matrix. The reconstruction shows ...

Dinosaur Study Challenges Bergmann's Rule

Apr. 5, 2024 — A new study calls into question Bergmann's rule, an 1800s-era scientific principle stating that animals in high-latitude, cooler climates tend to be larger than close relatives living in warmer ...

New Sunflower Family Tree Reveals Multiple Origins of Flower Symmetry

Apr. 3, 2024 — A new sunflower family tree used skimmed genomes to increase the number of species sampled, revealing that flower symmetry evolved multiple times independently, a process called convergent evolution, ...

Evolution in Action? New Study Finds Possibility of Nitrogen-Fixing Organelles

Apr. 3, 2024 — A new study finds that UCYN-A, a species of nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria, may be evolving organelle-like ...

We've Had Bird Evolution All Wrong

Apr. 3, 2024 — Genomic anamolies dating back to the time of the dinosaurs misled scientists about the evolutionary history of ...

These Plants Evolved in Florida Millions of Years Ago: They May Be Gone in Decades

Apr. 2, 2024 — Scrub mints are among the most endangered plants you've probably never heard of. More than half of the 24 species currently known to exist are considered threatened or endangered at the state or ...

Computational Tools Fuel Reconstruction of New and Improved Bird Family Tree

Apr. 1, 2024 — Using cutting-edge computational methods and supercomputing infrastructure, researchers have built the largest and most detailed bird family tree to date -- an intricate chart delineating 93 million ...

When Inequality Is More Than 'Skin-Deep': Social Status Leaves Traces in the Epigenome of Spotted Hyenas in Tanzania

Mar. 28, 2024 — A research consortium provides evidence that social behavior and social status are reflected at the molecular level of gene activation (epigenome) in juvenile and adult free-ranging spotted hyenas. ...

Genomic Research May Help Explain Cancer Resistance in Tasmanian Devils

Mar. 28, 2024 — Through DNA sequencing of Tasmanian devils and their tumors, researchers have tracked the genomic interactions between the animals and the ...

Scientists Extract Genetic Secrets from 4,000-Year-Old Teeth to Illuminate the Impact of Changing Human Diets Over the Centuries

Mar. 27, 2024 — Researchers have recovered remarkably preserved microbiomes from two teeth dating back 4,000 years, found in an Irish limestone cave. Genetic analyses of these microbiomes reveal major changes in the ...

Secrets of the Naked Mole-Rat: New Study Reveals How Their Unique Metabolism Protects Them from Heart Attacks

Mar. 27, 2024 — This unusual, subterranean mammal with extreme longevity shows genetic adaptations to low oxygen environments which could offer opportunities for advancing other areas of physiological and medical ...

Humans Pass More Viruses to Other Animals Than We Catch from Them

Mar. 25, 2024 — Humans pass on more viruses to domestic and wild animals than we catch from them, according to a major new analysis of viral ...

Researchers Discover Evolutionary 'Tipping Point' in Fungi

Mar. 25, 2024 — Scientists have found a 'tipping point' in the evolution of fungi that throttles their growth and sculpts their shapes. The findings demonstrate how small changes in environmental factors ...

Natural Recycling at the Origin of Life

Mar. 22, 2024 — How was complex life able to develop on the inhospitable early Earth? At the beginning there must have been ribonucleic acid (RNA) to carry the first genetic information. To build up complexity in ...

Rays Were More Diverse 150 Million Years Ago Than Previously Thought

Mar. 21, 2024 — Scientists have explored the puzzling world of rays that lived 150 million years ago and discovered a previously hidden diversity -- including a new ray species. This study significantly expands the ...

How Butterflies Choose Mates: Gene Controls Preferences

Mar. 21, 2024 — Tropical Heliconius butterflies are well known for the bright colour patterns on their wings. These striking colour patterns not only scare off predators -- the butterflies are poisonous and are ...

Decoding the Easter Bunny -- An Eastern Finnish Brown Hare to Represent the Standard for the Species' Genome

Mar. 20, 2024 — Biologists have published a chromosomally assembled reference genome for the European brown hare. The genome consists of 2.9 billion base pairs, which form 23 autosomal chromosomes, and X and Y sex ...

Across Oceans and Millennia: Decoding the Origin and History of the Bottle Gourd

Mar. 20, 2024 — Researchers have uncovered intriguing details about the origins and spread of the bottle gourd, one of the oldest domesticated crops. Their work unveils the genetic diversification and population ...

Tanks of the Triassic: New Crocodile Ancestor Identified

Mar. 18, 2024 — Dinosaurs get all the glory. But aetosaurs, a heavily armored cousin of modern crocodiles, ruled the world before dinosaurs did. These tanks of the Triassic came in a variety of shapes and sizes ...