From colorful lizards to ancient human DNA, scientists are uncovering new ways to understand how species evolve. Fresh models ...

Rare fossil finds show colossal octopuses were among the top ocean predators during the Cretaceous Period, according to a new ...

Humans spread across the world with a speed no other wild vertebrate has matched. We live in deserts, rainforests, high mountains, and deep cold. Most animals can’t even handle a fraction of that ...

This event is closed to the public. During the Holocene the scale and complexity of human societies increased dramatically. Generations of scholars have proposed different theories explaining this ...

Revised: This Reviewed Preprint has been revised by the authors in response to the previous round of peer review; the eLife assessment and the public reviews have been updated where necessary by the ...

A pair of Sacabambaspis fish, around 35 cm in length, which had distinct, forward-facing eyes and an armored head. No fossils of animals like Sacabambaspis from after the Late Ordovician Mass ...

Around 445 million years ago, Earth faced a crisis that reshaped life in the oceans. A rapid climate shift caused glaciers to spread across the giant southern landmass Gondwana. Sea levels dropped, ...

Conceptual overreach Conflation of distinct mechanisms BRT erroneously combines intra-lineage processes (balancing selection, cryptic variation) with inter-lineage processes (HGT) into a single, ...

In tropical climates, lizards are everywhere. It can be a bit wild to see, and they come in all shapes and sizes. They seem a tad superfluous in such large varieties leaving one to wonder, what ...

An updated evolutionary model shows that living systems evolve in a split-and-hit-the-gas dynamic, where new lineages appear in sudden bursts rather than during a long marathon of gradual changes.

Evolution is both a fact and a theory. Evolution is widely observable in laboratory and natural populations as they change over time. The fact that we need annual flu vaccines is one example of ...

This important study introduces an approach to discovering antibiotic resistance determinants by leveraging diverse susceptibility profiles among related mycobacterial species, with particular ...