Why did birds lose their teeth? Was it so they would be lighter in the air? Or are pointy beaks better for worm-eating than the jagged jaws of dinosaur ancestors?
Actually, birds gave up teeth to speed up egg hatching,...
Researchers from Osaka University have made the striking discovery that multidrug-resistant bacteria may have been around longer than we thought. In findings published this month in Communications Biology, the researchers investigated the evolutionary relationships among hundreds of RND-type efflux pumps—specialized...
Until recently, scientists thought of viruses as mostly small infectious agents, tiny compared to typical bacteria and human cells. So imagine the surprise when biologist Jeff Blanchard and Ph.D. student Lauren Alteio at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with...
Each year, the flu vaccine has to be redesigned to account for mutations that the virus accumulates, and even then, the vaccine is often not fully protective for everyone.
Researchers at MIT and the Ragon Institute of MIT, MGH, and...
Counting is vital in nature. Counting chromosomes is something that most animals, plants and even single-celled organisms need to know how to do to assure viability and to reproduce. Today, a team of geneticists reveals a remarkable mechanism that...
Brown long-eared bat swooping in for a tasty treat.
Credit: Prof Anders Hedenström
Bats catch food 'on the wing' without touching the ground, but how do they do it? A new study by Per Henningsson at Lund University, Sweden is the...
The rich levels of biodiversity on land seen across the globe today are not a recent phenomenon: diversity on land has been similar for at least the last 60 million years, since soon after the extinction of the...
Blame junk food or a lack of exercise. But long before the modern obesity epidemic, evolution made us fat too.
"We're the fat primates," said Devi Swain-Lenz, a postdoctoral associate in biology at Duke University.
The fact that humans are chubbier...
A long-awaited, high-tech analysis of the upper body of famed fossil "Little Foot" opens a window to a pivotal period when human ancestors diverged from apes, new USC research shows.
Little Foot's shoulder assembly proved key to interpreting an early...
Conservation action has prevented the global extinction of at least 28 bird and mammal species since 1993, a study led by Newcastle University, UK and BirdLife International has shown. The species include Puerto Rican Amazon Amazona vittata, Przewalski's Horse...
Skimmer porpoise reconstruction. Scientists have identified a new species of ancient porpoise with a chin length unprecedented among known mammals, and suggest the animal used the tip of its face to probe the seabed for food.Credit: Bobby Boessenecker
Millions of...
