https://phys.org/biology-news/evolution/ en-us The latest science news on evolution The time-development of species communities cannot be understood solely through ecological interactions or environmental factors, as evolution can also alter community dynamics. This observation helps to understand, among other things, the consequences of antibiotic resistance. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-mutation-rewired-species-bacterial-community.html Evolution Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:40:01 EDT news700242481 Sloths are the slowest mammals on the planet, but living in dense jungles has made them notoriously difficult to study. For the first time, scientists have now sequenced and analyzed the two-toed sloth genome and revealed the genetics behind its extremely slow metabolism. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-sloths-dna.html Evolution Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:00:03 EDT news700222262 Chimpanzees are the only great apes, apart from humans, that have adapted to living on savannas as well as in forests. However, it is not yet well understood how the harsh ecological conditions of the savanna—compared with those of the forest—affect the foods chimpanzees eat and how they obtain them. Now, a study led by the University of Barcelona and the Jane Goodall Institute Spain (IJGE) reveals for the first time the strategies savanna chimpanzees use to make tools and extract aggressive army ants—also known as marabunta—from their underground nests and eat them in these dry, hot habitats. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-savanna-chimpanzees-tools-capturing-army.html Evolution Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:20:06 EDT news700221962 Ground squirrel droppings, preserved for millennia in the Yukon's deep permafrost, have yielded an enormous amount of environmental DNA from dozens of species of plants, insects, microbes and large mammals, offering detailed genetic information about an environment that no longer exists. It is among the oldest ancient DNA ever recovered and sequenced. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-ancient-ground-squirrel-reveal-arctic.html Evolution Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:00:05 EDT news700130381 It's surprising how easy it is to see a koala every day in Australia's major cities. The cute, gray marsupial can be found on T-shirts, hanging off people's bags and pencils, and decorating any decent souvenir shop. But seeing a real koala in the wild has become increasingly tricky in some parts of the country. The iconic marsupial is now listed as endangered in Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-koala-australia-years-global-glacial.html Plants & Animals Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:00:01 EDT news700221301 The way that Earth's first animals reproduced held back life's diversity for millions of years, until stress and competition led to the development of sexual reproduction, which in turn accelerated the pace of evolution. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-lack-sex-held-life-diversity.html Evolution Tue, 09 Jun 2026 05:00:15 EDT news700126261 A genomic study has reshaped our understanding of the evolutionary history of the koala (Phascolarctos cinereus), revealing the iconic Australian marsupial experienced a severe population decline around 100,000 years ago, before the arrival of humans on the continent. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-koala-population-humans-genomic-reveals.html Plants & Animals Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:02 EDT news700128486 Typically, the information encoded in DNA allows organisms to develop, function, and pass traits across generations. Yet DNA alone does not explain how genes are switched on and off in different cells and environments. This regulation is partly controlled by other factors called epigenetics, such as DNA methylation, a chemical modification that can influence gene activity without changing the genetic code itself. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-epigenetic-inherited-dna-animals.html Evolution Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:00:01 EDT news699634336 European fallow deer have faced a dramatic loss of genetic diversity since the last interglacial period. This was revealed by 120,000-year-old fossils from central Germany's Neumark-Nord site in Saxony-Anhalt, analyzed by researchers from the University of Potsdam, the MONREPOS Research Center and Museum in Neuwied, and Leiden University. Their results have been published in the journal iScience. Modern fallow deer thus represent just a fraction of their Ice Age ancestors' variety. The study highlights how climate and human actions substantially reshaped a once-diverse species and may help inform conservation action. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-year-european-fallow-deer-loss.html Plants & Animals Sat, 06 Jun 2026 17:40:02 EDT news699874805 Many animals, including humans, rely on their eyes to detect changes in their surroundings. The eyes of vertebrates, animals with a backbone or a similar supporting structure, contain a transparent structure (i.e., the lens) that focuses incoming light onto a layer of light-sensitive cells, known as the retina. Cells in the retina then convert light into signals that are sent to the brain. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-hagfish-fossils-reveal-stepwise-eye.html Evolution Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:20:01 EDT news699796418 The supergiant bathynomid is a deep-sea isopod famous for surviving more than five years without food. Despite residing in an extremely low-nutrient habitat, these organisms exhibit pronounced body gigantism, a trait that requires substantial energy. This raises an energy paradox: How do these apparently energy-hungry isopods sustain their enormous size given the sporadic availability of food in the deep sea? https://phys.org/news/2026-06-deep-sea-supergiant-isopods-years.html Plants & Animals Fri, 05 Jun 2026 11:00:04 EDT news699867498 A new study tracking thousands of B cells across more than 100 germinal centers in mice reveals how the system consistently produces highly effective antibodies. The findings overturn longstanding ideas about how germinal centers function, revealing that they are far more selective than once thought, and challenges the idea that antibody improvement is driven mainly by rare growth "bursts" among the most successful B cells. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-body-reliable-antibodies-biological-chaos.html Evolution Fri, 05 Jun 2026 11:00:01 EDT news699781741 An international research team, including Dr. Nancy Mercado Salas from the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB), has described a new family of copepods (Copepoda). The discovery was made at a depth of more than 2,500 meters in the Irminger Basin, southeast of Greenland, and provides new insights into the evolution of a group of animals that has hitherto been poorly understood. The findings are published in the journal PeerJ. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-deep-sea-discovery-uncovers-family.html Evolution Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:00:03 EDT news699804601 A new study by plant biologists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, challenges a longstanding idea that stems from the large number of flowers in the mountains of Central and South America that have evolved to be pollinated by hummingbirds instead of bees. According to the research team, flowers make this switch—not because bees avoid cool, wet cloud forest conditions at higher elevations—but because hummingbirds are simply more effective pollinators. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-pollinators-evolutionary.html Evolution Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:00:04 EDT news699801783 New research shows Cheviot goats are one of the UK's most genetically distinct goat populations. Led by Newcastle University, this is the first genetic study to determine the ancestry and genetic health of a UK feral goat population. It provides a genetic assessment of the Cheviot goats in Northumberland's College Valley, identifying them as a historically significant and genetically distinct population unlike the other European goat breeds. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-rare-wild-goats-northumberland-genetically.html Plants & Animals Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:40:03 EDT news699801481 Leipzig Zoo in central Germany is a world-leading center of great ape research. Recent studies have seen chimpanzees there using touchscreen controls to navigate virtual forests and locate food rewards—applying similar techniques to what they would use in the wild. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-great-apes-cognition-cooperation-curiosity.html Evolution Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:00:02 EDT news699726121 Humans can communicate various instructions to dogs without using actual words—simply by modulating the tone of their voice, a new study from ELTE University's Department of Ethology shows. By repeating the nonsense syllable 'bü' in different intonations, humans successfully signaled "Yes," "No," "Here," and "There" and, remarkably, dogs responded correctly, despite receiving no prior training. The findings reveal ancient acoustic codes, interpretable across species, that predate language itself. The study was published in Cognition. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-dogs-human-tone-words-hinting.html Evolution Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:30:01 EDT news699720301 The first large-sized bovines grew to up to half a ton 4 million years ago in the European Early Pliocene, an early step toward our modern diversity of large-bodied buffalo and cattle, according to a study published June 3, 2026, in the open access journal PLOS One by Leonardo Sorbelli of the Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Germany, and colleagues. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-ton-early-bovines-roamed-million.html Evolution Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:00:05 EDT news699638342 The extinction that ended the Age of Dinosaurs is best known for clearing the way for the Age of Mammals on land. Scientists have long suspected that the same catastrophe also transformed life in the seas, opening ecological space for the rise of modern marine fish faunas. Yet the timing and geography of that transition have remained uncertain because of the sparse fossil record. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-egypt-fossils-modern-ocean-fish.html Evolution Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:00:04 EDT news699694441 Octopuses are remarkably intelligent creatures, as was demonstrated by Inky the Octopus's famous escape from the National Aquarium of New Zealand through a drainpipe back to sea in 2016. A new Dartmouth study shows octopuses can use mirrors to find food out of sight, demonstrating spatial cognitive abilities. The results are published in Current Biology. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-octopuses-mirror-prey.html Plants & Animals Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:40:07 EDT news699709322 Bryozoans are tiny, filter-feeding colonial invertebrates that thrive in the world's oceans today, yet for decades their origins presented a puzzling gap in the fossil record. While nearly every other major animal group made its first appearance during the Cambrian explosion roughly 530 million years ago, the bryozoan fossil record remained stubbornly silent until the Ordovician period, some 50 million years later. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-extraordinary-fossils-million-year-mystery.html Evolution Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:00:09 EDT news699636181 A new study on multiple genomes from the extinct cave lion has discovered that it represented a highly distinct evolutionary lineage, which separated from modern lions more than a million years ago. The results also show that the cave lion had a history of interbreeding with modern lions that was tightly linked to past climatic changes. These findings are published in the journal Cell in a study led by Swedish and British scientists. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-ancient-cave-lion-genomes-reveal.html Plants & Animals Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:00:02 EDT news699608582 Living in the Dead Sea would be a very unpleasant experience for most creatures. With salt concentration above 30% and temperatures ranging from 10–50°C, it takes unique environmental adaptations to survive in such harsh conditions. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-dead-sea-archaea-sport-tail.html Evolution Wed, 03 Jun 2026 10:40:01 EDT news699696781 Black abalone once carpeted the rocky shores of California by the millions. The large, long-lived sea snails sustained Indigenous peoples along the coast for thousands of years, anchored a thriving 20th-century commercial fishery and inspired generations of California cooks, divers, and artists. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-ancient-dna-california-critically-endangered.html Evolution Wed, 03 Jun 2026 10:20:09 EDT news699696541 Fossil fragments found in the U.K. have been identified as remains of the largest scorpions ever. Measuring more than a meter in length, Praearcturus gigas was among the first large predators to ever stalk the land. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-world-largest-scorpion-revealed-million.html Evolution Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:40:02 EDT news699695521 The question of why females mate with multiple males has long puzzled evolutionary biologists. A new study of African foam-nest tree frogs, led by University of Wollongong (UOW) researchers, reveals polyandry could be the key to reproductive success and a safer home for offspring. The findings shed light on how amphibians have evolved to protect their young in challenging environments, presenting a new hypothesis for the evolution of polyandry that ties mating behavior to the quality of nest construction. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-perks-polyandry-multiple-males-home.html Evolution Wed, 03 Jun 2026 08:20:02 EDT news699693122 A fossil mammal tooth smaller than a grain of rice does not announce itself loudly. It must be hard won from sediment and stone. Then, under a microscope, it reveals itself—no longer just a speck of blackness but a surface of cusps, ridges, and worn edges. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-life-ancient-arctic-tiny-teeth.html Evolution Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:40:04 EDT news699624003 A key step in the origin of many pandemics occurs when an animal-borne virus infects humans and then evolves to spread more efficiently from person to person. That is why scientists and physicians keep a close watch on viruses that could jump from animals to humans, such as emerging strains of avian flu and bat coronaviruses, as well as viruses that have already crossed into humans but, for now, spread poorly among people, such as hantavirus and Ebola. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-lab-evolution-recreates-covid-path.html Evolution Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:40:02 EDT news699619681 Tracks left by some of the earliest complex animals are giving new insights into how they experienced the world. New research reveals how these creatures started to understand their surroundings, paving the way for animal life to spread across the planet. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-animals-sharpening-cambrian-explosion-ancient.html Evolution Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:00:03 EDT news699617210 How did life make the leap from single cells to coordinated, multicellular organisms? And how do genetically identical cells still perform a version of that feat every time an embryo begins to take shape? https://phys.org/news/2026-06-story-multicellular-life-physics-genes.html Evolution Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:20:10 EDT news699616835