Darwin's greatest challenge tackled: the mystery of eye evolution
...umerilii, a marine worm that still resembles early ancestors that lived up to 600 million years ago. Arendt had seen pictures of this worm's brain taken by researcher Adriaan Dorresteijn (University of Mainz, Germany). "When I saw these pictures, I noticed that the shape of the cells in the worm's brain resemb...Are museum collections of ancient life representative?
...ronologically mapped. Barbour Wood is studying the ancestors of today's marine clams and snails. Her primary focus is the Eastover Formation of the upper most Miocene, about 6.5 million years ago. "It is an understudied period," Barbour Wood said. She is also interested in other time periods, but is collecting...Ancient fossil offers new clues to brown bears past
...in North America would have to be rewritten. The ancestors of modern brown bears in North America are believe...cists have found it difficult to explain where the ancestors of southern brown bears came from when ice sheets retreated about 13,000 years ago--their genetic ty...Endurance running may be key to evolution of human body form
...y strong endurance runners, permitting our ancient ancestors to compete for food with speedy four-legged carniv...us is that running evolved in order for our direct ancestors to compete with other carnivores for access to the protein needed to grow the big brains that we enj...Humans evolved from ape-like ancestors because they needed to run long distances perhaps...rs do not know why natural selection favored human ancestors who could run long distances. For one possibility, they cite previous research by University of Utah...Researchers discover defense mechanisms in some plants believed bred out by humans
... were fused, probably millions of years ago in the ancestors of the grasses. Such things usually happen as accidents (mutations), and, if advantageous, they get selected and passed to future generations. Surfaces of cells have glycoproteins that lectins recognize by their carbohydrate portion and bind t...New fossil may be closest yet to ancestor of all great apes
...archers have long been searching for the great ape ancestors that emerged after this split. The scanty fossil record has revealed several contenders, including Kenyapithecus , and Equatorius or the older Morotopithecus and Afropithecus , but the fossils that do exist indicate that these ancient "ho...Researchers reconstruct parts of the genome of a common mammalian ancestor
...s thought that we would never really know what our ancestors looked like at the genetic level, but now it appea...original sequence that can be compared. For common ancestors with fewer living descendant species, comparisons would be more difficult, as would also be the case...Genetic predisposition can play an important role in development of lung cancer
...containing all living Icelanders and most of their ancestors since the settlement of Iceland. The risk for smoking was similarly estimated using a random population-based group of 10,541 smokers from the Reykjavik Heart Study who had smoked for more than 10 years. Of these smokers, 562 developed lung cancer ba...Evidence that human brain evolution was a special event
... was apparently driven by strong selection. In the ancestors of humans, having bigger and more complex brains a... structures and cultural behaviors unique in human ancestors that fueled the rapid evolution of the brain. "This paper is going to open up lots of discussion," L...University of Chicago researchers discovered that humans are a 'privileged' evolutionary lineage
...her biological traits," he said. But how did human ancestors encounter an environment where selection for better brains suddenly became such a prominent force? Lahn suggests that because humans have become a progressively more social species, greater cognitive abilities have become more of an advantage. "As hu...Anthropologists find 4.5 million-year-old hominid fossils in Ethiopia
...s also report new evidence that suggests the human ancestors lived in close quarters with a menagerie of antelo...hecus is the first hominid genus -- that is, human ancestors who lived just after a split with the lineage that produced modern chimpanzees. Despite the million...Scientists find missing link between whale and its closest relative, the hippo
...ecialist while digging with Brunet for early human ancestors in the African republic of Chad. Most hominid fossils earlier than about 2 million years ago are found in association with hippo fossils, implying that they lived in the same biotopes and that hippos later became a source of food for our distant ance...Racial groupings match genetic profiles, Stanford study finds
...formation about people - the continent where their ancestors were born, the possible color of their skin and perhaps something about their risk of different diseases. But a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine finds that the checked box also says something about a person's gen...'Man the Hunter' theory is debunked in new book
..., many scientists theorized that those early human ancestors were hunters and possessed a killer instinct. Thr...and on environmental evidence, both of our hominid ancestors and the predators that coexisted with them." Since the process of human evolution is so long and va...Cricket's finicky mating behavior boosts biodiversity
...ase to recognize each other as mates. Although the ancestors recognized each other as mates, the descendants no longer do because of evolutionary change. In the case of Laupala, members of the two species are physiologically capable of mating. But they appear to lose the desire to interbreed before they lose t......om those expeditions. The fossil record of human ancestors may go back 6 million years or more, and the genus...ars ago when australopithecines evolved into human ancestors known as Homo habilis. Brown says the fossil record of humans is poor from 100,000 to 500,000 year...Gorilla diet tips -- Have we 'evolved to eat mush'?
... California (USC) hastens to add that our earliest ancestors weren't "buying cartons of eggs from the market," and probably ate many more raw vegetables, fruits and lean meats than today's heavy-protein advocates. Stanford concedes that studying our ancestors' lifestyles may not provide concrete diet tips for ......8. "Thanks to the archaeologists, we know that our ancestors went through two periods, each lasting more than a million years, when toolmaking techniques didn't gradually improve, despite a lot of gradual brain size increase." There is no lack of other candidates for why a bigger brain would be better. Calvi...