Charles Darwin News

November 24, 2024

Top Headlines

Scientists Use Ancient DNA to Shed Light on Adaptation of Early Europeans

Nov. 19, 2024 — Leveraging a unique statistical analysis and applying it to ancient DNA extracted from human skeletal remains, a team of researchers has revealed new insights into how ancient Europeans adapted to their environments over 7,000 years of European ...

New Fossil Reveals the Evolution of Flying Reptiles

Nov. 18, 2024 — A newly discovered pterosaur fossil is shedding light on the evolutionary journey of these ancient flying reptiles. This complete specimen, named Skiphosoura bavarica, provides crucial insights into how pterosaurs transitioned from early, smaller ...

The Secrets of Fossil Teeth Revealed by the Synchrotron: A Long Childhood Is the Prelude to the Evolution of a Large Brain

Nov. 13, 2024 — Could social bonds be the key to human big brains? A study of the fossil teeth of early Homo from Georgia dating back 1.77 million years reveals a prolonged childhood despite a small brain and an ...

Bird Brain from the Age of Dinosaurs Reveals Roots of Avian Intelligence

Nov. 13, 2024 — A 'one of a kind' fossil discovery could transform our understanding of how the unique brains and intelligence of modern birds evolved, one of the most enduring mysteries of vertebrate ...

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A New Wrinkle in Turtles: Their Genomes Fold in a Unique Way, Researchers Find

Nov. 11, 2024 — A study described the three-dimensional architecture of turtle genomes, which fold in a configuration unlike any other animal observed so ...

New Insights Into the Denisovans: New Hominin Group That Interbred With Modern Day Humans

Nov. 8, 2024 — Scientists believe individuals of the most recently discovered 'hominin' group (the Denisovans) that interbred with modern day humans passed on some ...

Evolutionary Paths Vastly Differ for Birds, Bats

Nov. 1, 2024 — New research has found that, unlike birds, the evolution of bats' wings and legs is tightly coupled, which may have prevented them from filling as many ecological niches as ...

How Life Began on Earth: Modeling Earth's Ancient Atmosphere

Oct. 31, 2024 — This model reveals how vastly different the atmosphere was on ancient Earth, and how life may have first ...

Ancient Gene Influences Immunity of First Nations Peoples of Oceania

Oct. 29, 2024 — An ancient gene mutation among First Nations inhabitants of Oceania may make them more susceptible to infectious diseases like influenza, according to a new ...

How Mammals Got Their Stride

Oct. 25, 2024 — Researchers reveal new insights into the complex evolutionary history behind the distinctive upright posture of modern placental and marsupial mammals, showing the transition was surprisingly complex ...

Human Actions Likely Cause Insect Color Change

Oct. 24, 2024 — New Zealand's native stoneflies have changed colour in response to human-driven environmental changes, new research shows. The study provides arguably the world's most clear-cut case of animal ...

Turtle Genome Provides New Clues on the Evolution of Vertebrates

Oct. 21, 2024 — Scientists have generated the genome assemblies of two hidden-neck turtles, unpublished until now. The results, which revealed a new three-dimensional structure of the genome within the phylogenetic ...

Creating a Simplified Form of Life

Oct. 21, 2024 — How can lifeless molecules come together to form a living ...

Why Do We Love Carbs? The Origins Predate Agriculture and Maybe Even Our Split from Neanderthals

Oct. 17, 2024 — A new study reveals how the duplication of the salivary amylase gene may not only have helped shape human adaptation to starchy foods, but may have ...

Adaptability of Trees Persists After Millions of Years of Climate Change

Oct. 14, 2024 — Seven of the most common forest trees in Europe have been shown to be able to shelter their genetic diversity from major shifts in environmental conditions. This is despite their ranges having shrunk ...

How Did the Building Blocks of Life Arrive on Earth?

Oct. 11, 2024 — Researchers have used the chemical fingerprints of zinc contained in meteorites to determine the origin of volatile elements on Earth. The results suggest that without 'unmelted' asteroids, ...

How Playing Songs to Darwin's Finches Helped Biologists Confirm Link Between Environment and the Emergence of New Species

Oct. 10, 2024 — They say that hindsight is 20/20, and though the theory of ecological speciation -- which holds that new species emerge in response to ecological changes -- seems to hold in retrospect, it has been ...

Early Human Species Benefited from Food Diversity in Steep Mountainous Terrain

Oct. 10, 2024 — A new study shows that the patchwork of different ecosystems found in mountainous regions played a key role in the evolution of ...

In Studying the Mating Rituals of Fruit Flies, Scientists May Have Learned Something About How Brains Evolve

Oct. 9, 2024 — Researchers have identified how the architecture of brain circuits helps different species flexibly adapt to new mating signals across evolutionary ...

New Seed Fossil Sheds Light on Wind Dispersal in Plants

Oct. 8, 2024 — Scientists have discovered one of the earliest examples of a winged seed, granting insight into the origin and early evolution of wind dispersal strategies in ...

Pterosaurs Needed Feet on the Ground to Become Giants

Oct. 4, 2024 — A study determines when and how pterosaurs went from tiny tree-climbers to towering terrestrial titans Flying reptiles first came down from the trees in the mid-Jurassic Period, paving the way for ...

New Findings Supply Corrective to Evolutionary Hypothesis

Oct. 3, 2024 — The study blends math, statistics and biology to show that this long-held hyperbolic pattern is an anomaly because it doesn't account for the fact that all species on earth are defined as much ...

Do Coyotes Have Puppy Dog Eyes? New Study Reveals Wild Canines Share Dog's Famous Expression

Oct. 2, 2024 — A new study challenges the hypothesis that 'puppy dog eyes' evolved exclusively in dogs as a result of ...

Brazilian Fossils Reveal Jaw-Dropping Discovery in Mammal Evolution

Sep. 25, 2024 — The discovery of new cynodont fossils from southern Brazil by a team of palaeontologists has led to a significant breakthrough in understanding the evolution of ...

World's Oldest Cheese Reveals Origins of Kefir

Sep. 25, 2024 — Scientists successfully extracted and analyzed DNA from ancient cheese samples found alongside the Tarim Basin mummies in China, dating back approximately 3,600 years. The research suggests a new ...

Unveiling Ancient Life: New Method Sheds Light on Early Cellular and Metabolic Evolution

Sep. 24, 2024 — Analyzing fossils can be difficult -- especially when they're so small that they can only be seen with a microscope. Researchers have now come up with a ...

Researchers Publish Breakthrough Study on How New Genes Evolve

Sep. 19, 2024 — Findings suggest that new genes can form by repurposing fragments of ancestral genes while incorporating entirely new coding regions (the protein-coding parts of the DNA). This innovative concept ...

Genomics Reveals Sled Dogs' Siberian Lineage

Sep. 16, 2024 — New research examines thousands of years of Arctic sled dog ancestry and reveals when and how Siberian and Alaskan sled dogs' DNA ...

New Fossil Fish Species Scales Up Evidence of Earth's Evolutionary March

Sep. 12, 2024 — Climate change and asteroids are linked with animal origin and extinction -- and plate tectonics also seems to play a key evolutionary role, 'groundbreaking' new fossil research reveals. ...

Flightless Parrot in New Zealand Developed Different Feather Colors to Evade Predatory Birds

Sep. 10, 2024 — Aotearoa New Zealand's flightless parrot, the k k p , evolved two different color types to potentially help them avoid detection by a now-extinct apex predator, researchers ...

With AI, Extreme Microbe Reveals How Life's Building Blocks Adapt to High Pressure

Sep. 9, 2024 — An assist from a Google Artificial Intelligence tool has helped scientists discover how the proteins of a heat-loving microbe respond to the crushing conditions of the planet's deepest ocean ...

Agriculture Accelerated Human Genome Evolution to Capture Energy from Starchy Foods

Sep. 4, 2024 — Scientists have suspected that modern humans have more genes to digest starch than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but the amylase locus of the genome is hard to study. Researchers have now developed ...

Genomic Dark Matter Solves Butterfly Evolutionary Riddle

Aug. 30, 2024 — Researchers have uncovered a surprising genetic mechanism that influences the vibrant and complex patterns on butterfly wings. The team discovered that an RNA molecule, rather than a protein as ...

Darwin's Fear Was Unjustified: Writing Evolutionary History by Bridging the Gaps a Big Issue

Aug. 26, 2024 — Fossils are used to reconstruct evolutionary history, but not all animals and plants become fossils and many fossils are destroyed before we can find them (e.g., the rocks that contain the fossils ...