Evolution

In a review of 100 years of research on the sensory systems in whales, Rachel Racicot, research assistant professor of biological sciences, describes advances in the field and key questions that remain. Read More

Isotope analysis of ancient Peruvian teeth gives anthropologists a clearer image of how cooperating societies function. Read More

Studying “cheater” and “cooperative” mitochondria under environmental pressure delivers solid evolutionary conclusions in a longstanding theoretical field. Read More

With a new app from a team at Vanderbilt, birdsong researchers can better leverage crowdsourced fieldwork and audio recordings from amateur birders and citizen songbird scientists. Read More

The quokka, a small marsupial native to Australia, is an example of a species vulnerable to extinction in the country’s harsh surroundings. In a new study, researchers at Vanderbilt University demonstrate evidence for the dramatic decline of quokkas over the past century. Read More

When it comes to our differences from Neanderthals, most of what we know comes from comparing fossils. But fossils can only tell us about bones and not whole living organisms. That’s changing thanks to a new paper from a team of genomics researchers at Vanderbilt, who… Read More

Picky females force male songbirds to become better singers. Read More

“They are behaving like animals, and that’s a link between them and what we recognize as animals," says paleontologist Simon A.F. Darroch. Read More

A group of budding yeasts in the genus Hanseniaspora, which is closely related to the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has lost large numbers of genes related to cell cycle and DNA repair processes. Read More

Louise Rollins-Smith and colleagues have discovered a new way that a deadly fungus evades frogs' immune systems. Read More