Blinking is crucial for the eye. It's how animals clean their eyes, protect them, and even communicate. But how and why did blinking originate? Researchers have studied the mudskipper, an amphibious ...

Scientists explored the evolutionary success of leaf beetles, the most diverse herbivores on Earth. They showed that symbioses with bacteria have evolved repeatedly and independently in different ...

Q: Why do we humans have a hard time understanding, and sometimes accepting, evolution? What, in your opinion, is the major stumbling block? A: Deep time is hard to grasp. I don't know that it or any ...

The intersection of human evolution and Earth’s environmental history brings together two areas of scientific study with exceptionally high public visibility and broad societal interest—human ...

The title to this website is quite the enigma, as “understanding evolution” seems to simultaneously be both an easy task and an impossible undertaking. Indeed, there is a difference between grasping ...

South Africa has one of the world’s richest fossil records of hominins (humans and their fossil ancestors). But many misconceptions still exist regarding human evolution, and school textbooks contain ...

Evolution is perhaps the most extraordinary story ever told—a tale spanning billions of years that connects every living thing on Earth through an intricate web of shared ancestry. From the tiniest ...

On a recent summer evening, my wife was busy page-turning our copy of the weekly New Yorker magazine. Like many of us, the cartoons were the main attraction with occasional stops at articles that ...

A new study shows how the virus that causes COVID-19 is related to the virus that caused the SARS outbreak of 2003. The new family tree of these viruses could help predict which viruses circulating in ...

A new SwRI-led paper highlights the scientific progress made in understanding the evolution of terrestrial planets, including the effects of late large impacts on pre-existing modes of tectonics. For ...

Life changes over time. Of course, it does. We know this thanks to a wealth of converging evidence in the form of millions of fossils, clear genetic clues, and observations made out in the field and ...