Evolution
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Dolphin ancestor’s hearing was more like hoofed mammals than today’s sea creatures
The team, one of the first in the world to examine the ability’s origins, used a small CT scanner to look inside a 30-million-year-old ear bone fossil from a specimen resembling Olympicetus avitus. Read MoreMay 15, 2019
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Climate change helped kill off super-sized Ice Age animals in Australia
A new study has compared the diet of a variety of Australian megafaunal herbivores from the period when they were widespread (350,000 to 570,000 years ago) to a period when they were in decline (30,000 to 40,000 years ago) by studying their fossil teeth. The analysis suggests that climate change had a significant impact on their diets and may well have been a primary factor in their extinction. Read MoreJanuary 26, 2017
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Each animal species hosts a unique microbial community and benefits from it
A laboratory study of four animal species and their microbiota finds that each species hosts a unique community of microbes that can significantly improve its health and fitness. Read MoreNovember 28, 2016
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Transcription factor evolution
Vanderbilt researchers have discovered a novel model of evolution for factors that control gene expression. Read MoreAugust 11, 2016
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Discovery of male-harming DNA mutation reinforces ‘mother’s curse’ hypothesis
There is new evidence that the "mother’s curse" – the possibility that moms may transmit genes to their children that harm their sons but not their daughters – holds true in animals. Read MoreAugust 2, 2016
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Newly discovered fossils strengthen proposition that world’s first mass extinction engineered by early animals
New fossil evidence strengthens the proposition that the world’s first mass extinction was caused by ‘ecosystem engineers’ – newly evolved organisms that radically altered the environment. Read MoreJuly 29, 2016
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Neanderthal DNA has subtle but significant impact on human traits
The first study that directly compares Neanderthal DNA in the genomes of a significant population of adults of European ancestry with their clinical records confirms that this archaic genetic legacy has a subtle but significant impact on modern human biology. Read MoreFebruary 11, 2016
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Evidence that Earth’s first mass extinction was caused by critters, not catastrophe
The Earth's first mass extinction event 540 million years ago was caused not by a meteorite impact or volcanic super-eruption, but by the rise of early animals that dramatically changed to prehistoric environment. Read MoreSeptember 2, 2015
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The pronoun ‘I’ is becoming obsolete
Recent microbiological research has shown that plants and animals, including humans, are not autonomous individuals but are holobionts: biomolecular networks that consist of visible hosts plus millions of invisible microbes. Read MoreAugust 19, 2015
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Evolutionary history of whales, dolphins and sea turtles
The evolutionary history of whales, sea turtles and other land animals that have returned to the sea details the radical changes to their life style, body shape, physiology that they made to survive in an aquatic environment. Read MoreApril 17, 2015