Seafaring spiders depend on their 'sails' and 'anchors'

Spiders travel across water like ships, using their legs as sails and their silk as an anchor, according to research published in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. The study helps explain how spiders are able ...

What did the first snakes look like?

The ancestral snakes in the grass actually lived in the forest, according to the most detailed look yet at the iconic reptiles.

The hoo's hoo of gibbon communication

The secret communication of gibbons has been interpreted for the first time in a study published in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. The research reveals the likely meaning of a number of distinct gibbon ...

What makes the feather soar

Dinosaurs may have gone extinct some 66 million years ago, but that's hardly the end of their story. One group of their modern-day progeny, the class Avia—namely, birds—is a spectacular evolutionary success story. With ...

Ancient fossils confirmed among our strangest cousins

More than 100 years since they were first discovered, some of the world's most bizarre fossils have been identified as distant relatives of humans, thanks to the work of University of Adelaide researchers.

Sloths are no slouches when it comes to evolution

Today's sloths might be known as slow, small animals, but their ancestors developed large body sizes at an amazing rate, according to an evolutionary reconstruction published today in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary ...

Zombie ant fungi 'know' brains of their hosts

(Phys.org) —A parasitic fungus that reproduces by manipulating the behavior of ants emits a cocktail of behavior-controlling chemicals when encountering the brain of its natural target host, but not when infecting other ...

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