Crocodiles Evolved Backwards From Warm-Blooded Species to Cold-Blooded Killers
Despite an incredible number of visible differences, modern-day crocodiles and birds share a common ancestor dating back to…
This 236-Million-Year-Old Fossil Just Rewrote the Story of Live Birth
The vast majority of mammals alive today—including us—give birth to live young, but this reproductive mode isn’t unique…
The Weirdest Theory Yet for Why Life on Earth Suddenly Exploded
In the first 20 million years of the Cambrian period, Earth experienced an explosion of life—a great evolutionary…
1.4-Million-Year-Old Footprints Reveal a Giant Human Relative
One of the large, 1.4-million-year-old footprints that the team excavated. A 6-inch (~15 cm) ruler is shown for…
Inside the strange physics of why time stops at the speed of light
A clock aboard a fast-moving spacecraft does not break, lag or malfunction. It ticks normally for everyone inside.…
T. Rex Babies Were No Bigger Than House Cats—But Already Deadly
Paleontologists know very little about Tyrannosaurus rex babies. Given how long these iconic carnivores have loomed over the…
Volcanoes Started Earth’s ‘Great Dying.’ This Unexpected Plant Made It Worse
Some 200 million years ago, dramatic changes in climate and geology drove the extinction of approximately 80% of…
Genetic trade-offs in fertility and longevity explain the maintenance of disease-associated alleles in humans
Welter, D. et al. The NHGRI GWAS Catalog, a curated resource of SNP-trait associations. Nucleic Acids Res. 42,…
Rates of passerine body plan evolution in time and space
Jablonski, D., Roy, K. & Valentine, J. W. Out of the tropics: evolutionary dynamics of the latitudinal diversity…
Stanford Scientists Solve a 252-Million-Year-Old Mass Extinction Mystery
Representative samples of the modern fauna (left three samples) and the Paleozoic fauna (right four samples). Credit: Sarah…
567-Million-Year-Old Fossils Suggest Animals Evolved Earlier Than We Thought
Reconstruction of a hypothetical deep-water paleocommunity from the new fossil site in Canada’s Northwest Territories, based on fossils…
This Fossil Might Be the Earliest Known Case of Face-Stabbing in Human History
Even today, a stab to the face is considered a fairly serious injury. So, one can imagine how…