NewScITech

Before fish began to invade land, about 365 million years ago, they had some big problems to solve. They needed to come up with new ways to move, breathe, and eat. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists have confirmed the existence of protein in soft tissue recovered from the fossil bones of a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) and a half-million-year-old mastodon. Read the rest of this entry »

An international team of American and Chinese paleontologists has discovered a new species of mammal that lived 125 million years ago during the Mesozoic Era, in what is now the Hebei Province in China. Read the rest of this entry »

Ape-like human ancestors known as australopiths maintained short legs for 2 million years because a squat physique and stance helped the males fight over access to females, a University of Utah study concludes. Read the rest of this entry »

Male Anole lizards signal ownership of their territory by sitting up on a tree trunk, bobbing their heads up and down and extending a colorful throat pouch. Read the rest of this entry »

Oxford researchers have used new dating techniques on a human skull to help find out where our most recent common ancestor came from. The skull, which was discovered more than 50 years ago near the town of Hofmeyr in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, is thought to be 36,000 years old, according to the study published in the Science journal. Read the rest of this entry »

Birds with brains that are large in relation to their body size have a lower mortality rate than those with smaller brains, according to new research published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences today. Read the rest of this entry »

How did our evolutionary ancestors make sense of their world? What strategies did they use, for example, to find food? Fossils do not preserve thoughts, so we have so far been unable to glean any insights into the cognitive structure of our ancestors. Read the rest of this entry »

In the animal kingdom cooperation is crucial for survival. Predators hunt in prides and prey band together to protect themselves. Yet no other creature cooperates as successfully as we do. But where did this ability come from, and is it uniquely human? Scientists from Max Planck Institute show that our close relatives, chimpanzees, are much better cooperators than we thought. Read the rest of this entry »

Australian and US scientists have discovered a new group of organisms living in the pH equivalent of battery acid at a Californian mine. Read the rest of this entry »

Who of us has not dreamt of living on an island? Apparently, island life has certain advantages. This is also true for the marine iguanas. For millions of years they have lived without natural predators. In the course of evolution they have become excessively tame. Hundreds of reptiles doze, spread-eagled, on black lava rocks, soaking up the sun - behaviour that would be unthinkable in an environment with predators, where reptiles are persistently exposed to the threat of being devoured by others. Read the rest of this entry »

Studying rocks on Mars, which are among the oldest rocks in the Solar System, could provide scientists with key evidence of how the earliest forms of life arose on Earth, say researchers writing in this month’s edition of Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres. Read the rest of this entry »

Geologists have uncovered evidence in the oil fields of Oman that explains how Earth could suddenly have changed 540 million years ago to favor the evolution of the single-celled life forms to the multicellular forms we know today. Read the rest of this entry »

While hybrids — the result of the mating of two different species — may offer interesting and beneficial traits, they are usually sterile or unable to survive. For example, a mule, the result of the mating of a horse and a donkey, is sterile. Read the rest of this entry »

Countering the widespread view of evolution as a process played out over the course of eons, evolutionary biologists have shown that natural selection can turn on a dime - within months - as a population’s needs change. In a study of island lizards exposed to a new predator, the scientists found that natural selection dramatically changed direction over a very short time, within a single generation, favoring first longer and then shorter hind legs. Read the rest of this entry »