Charles Darwin News

September 20, 2024

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Researchers Publish Breakthrough Study on How New Genes Evolve

Sep. 19, 2024 — Findings suggest that new genes can form by repurposing fragments of ancestral genes while incorporating entirely new coding regions (the protein-coding parts of the DNA). This innovative concept bridges the gap between entirely new gene formation ...

New Fossil Fish Species Scales Up Evidence of Earth's Evolutionary March

Sep. 12, 2024 — Climate change and asteroids are linked with animal origin and extinction -- and plate tectonics also seems to play a key evolutionary role, 'groundbreaking' new fossil research reveals. The discovery of an exceptionally well preserved ancient ...

Genomics Reveals Sled Dogs' Siberian Lineage

Sep. 16, 2024 — New research examines thousands of years of Arctic sled dog ancestry and reveals when and how Siberian and Alaskan sled dogs' DNA ...

Flightless Parrot in New Zealand Developed Different Feather Colors to Evade Predatory Birds

Sep. 10, 2024 — Aotearoa New Zealand's flightless parrot, the k k p , evolved two different color types to potentially help them avoid detection by a now-extinct apex predator, researchers ...

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With AI, Extreme Microbe Reveals How Life's Building Blocks Adapt to High Pressure

Sep. 9, 2024 — An assist from a Google Artificial Intelligence tool has helped scientists discover how the proteins of a heat-loving microbe respond to the crushing ...

Agriculture Accelerated Human Genome Evolution to Capture Energy from Starchy Foods

Sep. 4, 2024 — Scientists have suspected that modern humans have more genes to digest starch than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but the amylase locus of the genome ...

Genomic Dark Matter Solves Butterfly Evolutionary Riddle

Aug. 30, 2024 — Researchers have uncovered a surprising genetic mechanism that influences the vibrant and complex patterns on butterfly wings. The team discovered that an RNA molecule, rather than a protein as ...

How Baleen Whales Have Adapted Over the Past 50 Million Years

Aug. 22, 2024 — The largest dataset of cetacean genes ever collated has helped scientists deep dive 'into the blue' to fathom the 'triumph' of baleen whale evolution. The new study explores the key genetic ...

Darwin's Fear Was Unjustified: Writing Evolutionary History by Bridging the Gaps a Big Issue

Aug. 26, 2024 — Fossils are used to reconstruct evolutionary history, but not all animals and plants become fossils and many fossils are destroyed before we can find ...

Bonobos and Ancient Origin of the 'Common Enemy Effect'

Aug. 23, 2024 — A link between outgroup threats and ingroup cohesion has been considered since the time of Darwin to be an adaptation for group-based competition. During the years since, studies of all sorts -- from ...

Creature the Size of a Dust Grain Found Hiding in California's Mono Lake

Aug. 22, 2024 — Mono Lake is a beautiful but harsh environment, its salty and arsenic-laced water home to brine shrimp, alkali flies and little else. Scientists recently discovered an unsuspected resident, however, ...

Life from a Drop of Rain: New Research Suggests Rainwater Helped Form the First Protocell Walls

Aug. 21, 2024 — New research shows that rainwater could have helped create a meshy wall around protocells 3.8 billion years ago, a critical step in the transition ...

Next Time You Beat a Virus, Thank Your Microbial Ancestors

Aug. 21, 2024 — When you get infected with a virus, some of the first weapons your body deploys to fight it were passed down to us from our microbial ancestors billions of years ago. According to new research, two ...

Fossil Hotspots in Africa Obscure a More Complete Picture of Human Evolution

Aug. 20, 2024 — A new study shows how the mismatch between where fossils are preserved and where humans likely lived may influence our understanding of early human ...

Why Do Plants Wiggle? New Study Provides Answers

Aug. 15, 2024 — Decades after his voyage on the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin became fascinated by why plants move as they grow -- spinning and twisting into corkscrews. Now, more than 150 years later, a new study may ...

Decoding the World's Largest Animal Genome

Aug. 14, 2024 — Scientists have sequenced the largest genome of all animals, the lungfish genome. Their data help to explain how the fish-ancestors of today's land vertebrates were able to conquer ...

Rewriting the Evolutionary History of Critical Components of the Nervous System

Aug. 13, 2024 — A new study has rewritten the conventionally understood evolutionary history of certain ion channels -- proteins critical for electrical signaling in the nervous system. The study shows that the ...

Smallest Arm Bone in Human Fossil Record Sheds Light on the Dawn of Homo Floresiensis

Aug. 6, 2024 — A new study reports the discovery of extremely rare early human fossils from the Indonesian island of Flores, including an astonishingly small adult limb bone. Dated to about 700,000 years old, the ...

Study Analyzes Potato-Pathogen 'Arms Race' After Irish Famine

Aug. 5, 2024 — Researchers reveal more about the tit-for-tat evolutionary changes occurring in both potato plants and the pathogen that caused the 1840s Irish potato ...

Sea Level Changes Shaped Early Life on Earth, Fossil Study Reveals

Aug. 2, 2024 — Shifts in the Earth's continental plates that drove long-term changes in sea level set the stage for the evolution of the earliest animals on Earth, a study ...

What Gave the First Molecules Their Stability?

Aug. 2, 2024 — The origins of life remain a major mystery. How were complex molecules able to form and remain intact for prolonged periods without disintegrating? A team has demonstrated a mechanism that could have ...

Half a Billion-Year-Old Spiny Slug Reveals the Origins of Mollusks

Aug. 2, 2024 — Exceptional fossils with preserved soft parts reveal that the earliest mollusks were flat, armored slugs without shells. The new species, Shishania aculeata, was covered with hollow, organic, ...

Demographics of North African Human Populations Unravelled Using Genomic Data and Artificial Intelligence

Aug. 2, 2024 — A new study places the origin of the Imazighen in the Epipaleolithic, more than twenty thousand years ago. The research concludes that the genetic origin of the current Arab population of north ...

Scientists Untangle Interactions Between the Earth's Early Life Forms and the Environment Over 500 Million Years

July 29, 2024 — The atmosphere, the ocean and life on Earth interacted over the past 500-plus million years in ways that improved conditions for early organisms to thrive. Now, an interdisciplinary team of ...

Lampreys Possess a 'Jaw-Dropping' Evolutionary Origin

July 26, 2024 — Lampreys are one of only two living jawless vertebrates Jaws are formed by a key stem cell population called the neural crest New research reveals the gene regulatory changes that may explain ...

Ancient Marine Animal Had Inventive Past Despite Being Represented by Few Species

July 25, 2024 — Brachiopods were evolving in new directions but this did not turn into evolutionary success in terms of the numbers of species, researchers have ...

Taco-Shaped Arthropod Fossils Gives New Insights Into the History of the First Mandibulates

July 23, 2024 — Palaeontologists are helping resolve the evolution and ecology of Odaraia, a taco-shaped marine animal that lived during the Cambrian period. Fossils reveal Odaraia had mandibles. Palaeontologists ...

New Snake Discovery Rewrites History, Points to North America's Role in Snake Evolution

July 19, 2024 — A new species of fossil snake unearthed in Wyoming is rewriting our understanding of snake evolution. The discovery, based on four remarkably well-preserved specimens found curled together in a ...

Ancient Microbes Offer Clues to How Complex Life Evolved

July 16, 2024 — Researchers have discovered that a single-celled organism, a close relative of animals, harbors the remnants of ancient giant viruses woven into its own genetic code. This finding sheds light on how ...

Insight Into One of Life's Earliest Ancestors Revealed in New Study

July 12, 2024 — Researchers have shed light on Earth's earliest ecosystem, showing that within a few hundred million years of planetary formation, life on Earth was already ...

AI-Powered Study Explores Under-Studied Female Evolution

July 1, 2024 — Pioneering AI-powered research on butterflies has probed the under-studied evolution of females and adds to a debate between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel ...

Last Surviving Woolly Mammoths Were Inbred but Not Doomed to Extinction

June 27, 2024 — The last population of woolly mammoths was isolated on Wrangel Island off the coast of Siberia 10,000 years ago, when sea levels rose and cut the mountainous island off from the mainland. A new ...

Researchers Find Genetic Stability in a Long-Term Panamanian Hybrid Zone of Manakin Birds

June 26, 2024 — We often think of species as separate and distinct, but sometimes they can interbreed and create hybrids. When this happens consistently in a specific area, it forms what's known as a hybrid ...

Newly Discovered Dinosaur Boasts Big, Blade-Like Horns

June 20, 2024 — A new dinosaur has been identified and named. The dinosaur's name, Lokiceratops rangiformis, translates roughly to 'Loki's horned face that looks like a ...