Category: Charles Darwin
When Charles Darwin visited the Falkland Islands during the voyage of the Beagle in 1835, he saw a wolf-like species, wrote about it in his diaries and correctly commented that it was being hunted in such large numbers that it would soon become extinct.
To celebrate the 150th anniversary this month of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) is publishing open access two peer-reviewed articl
Tree-dwelling ants generally live in harmony with their arboreal hosts.
When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species 150 years ago, he deliberately avoided the subject of the origin of life.
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- A 21-year Michigan State University experiment that distills the essence of evolution in laboratory flasks not only demonstrates natural selection at work, but could lead to biotechnology and medical research advances, researchers said.
Staying at home may have given the very first termite youngsters the best opportunity to rule the colony when their parents were killed by their neighbors. This is according to new research supported by the National Science Foundation and published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Australian researchers have discovered a huge number of new species of invertebrate animals living in underground water, caves and "micro-caverns" amid the harsh conditions of the Australian outback.
A national team of 18 researchers has discovered 850 new species of invertebrates, which include various insects, small crustaceans, spiders, worms and many others.
You're not as different from Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin after all, at least when it comes to patterns of correspondence.
A new Northwestern University study of human behavior has determined that those who wrote letters using pen and paper -- long before electronic mail existed -- did so in a pattern similar to the way people use e-mail today.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In a vivid illustration of natural selection at work, scientists at Harvard University have found that deer mice living in Nebraska's Sand Hills quickly evolved lighter coloration after glaciers deposited sand dunes atop what had been much darker soil. The work is described this week in the journal Science.
DURHAM, N.C. -- The lowly appendix, long-regarded as a useless evolutionary artifact, won newfound respect two years ago when researchers at Duke University Medical Center proposed that it actually serves a critical function. The appendix, they said, is a safe haven where good bacteria could hang out until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea, for example.
DURHAM, N.C. -- A detailed examination of the wrist bones of several primate species challenges the notion that humans evolved their two-legged upright walking style from a knuckle-walking ancestor.
The same lines of evidence also suggest that knuckle-walking evolved at least two different times, making gorillas distinct from chimpanzees and bonobos.
For Mark Changizi, it’s all in the eyes.
About half of the human brain is used for vision, and sight is the best understood and most thoroughly investigated of the five senses.
A long-standing mystery surrounding a fundamental process in plant biology has been solved by a team of scientists at the University of California, Davis.
The group's ground-breaking discovery that a plant hormone called auxin is responsible for egg production has several major implications.
Since the days of Charles Darwin, researchers are interested in reconstructing the "Tree of Life", and in understanding the development of animal and plant species during their evolutionary history. In the case of vertebrates, this research has already come quite a long way.
“Undesirable” evolution in fish – which makes their bodies grow smaller and fishery catches dwindle -- can actually be reversed in a few decades’ time by changing our “take-the-biggest-fish” approach to commercial fishing, according to groundbreaking new research published today by Stony Brook University scientists in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Intensive harvesting of the largest
