A hefty set of tusks is usually an advantage for elephants, allowing them to dig for water, strip bark for food and joust with other elephants. But during episodes of intense ivory poaching, those big incisors become a liability.
Plants & Animals
Oct 21, 2021
1
651
To borrow a line from the movie "Jurassic Park:" Dinosaurs do move in herds. And a new study shows that the prehistoric creatures lived in herds much earlier than previously thought.
Evolution
Oct 21, 2021
1
725
Nearly half of our DNA has been written off as junk, the discards of evolution: Sidelined or broken genes, viruses that got stuck in our genome and were dismembered or silenced, none of it relevant to the human organism or ...
Evolution
Oct 18, 2021
0
785
Modern snakes evolved from ancestors that lived side by side with the dinosaurs and that likely fed mainly on insects and lizards.
Evolution
Oct 14, 2021
0
456
Six, 12, and 18. These are the ages that most people get their three adult molars or large chewing teeth towards the back of the mouth. These teeth come in at a much later age than they do in our closest living relative, ...
Evolution
Oct 6, 2021
0
314
Tardigrades, also known as water bears, are a diverse group of charismatic microscopic invertebrates that are best known for their ability to survive extreme conditions. A famous example was a 2007 trip to space where tardigrades ...
Evolution
Oct 5, 2021
1
6387
This year is the 20th anniversary of sequencing the human genome. In honor of this event, a research team led by Prof. FU Qiaomei from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy ...
Evolution
Sep 24, 2021
2
1006
Charles Darwin was obsessed with domestic pigeons. He thought they held the secrets of selection in their beaks. Free from the bonds of natural selection, the 350-plus breeds of domestic pigeons have beaks of all shapes and ...
Evolution
Sep 21, 2021
0
517
A Stanford-led study reveals that rather than evolving gradually over hundreds of millions of years, land plants underwent major diversification in two dramatic bursts, 250 million years apart. The first occurred early in ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 16, 2021
0
2152
A new study suggests that all living snakes evolved from a handful of species that survived the giant asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs and most other living things at the end of the Cretaceous. The authors say ...
Evolution
Sep 14, 2021
1
1964
