Showing posts with the label
Evolution
Mating between domesticated dogs and wild wolves over hundreds of years has left a genetic mark on the wolf gene pool, new research has shown. A black Italian wolf [Credit: Graziano Tortelli] The int…
Domestication of wild animals may have accelerated as promiscuity increased among the high density populations drawn to life near humans, according to a new paper by University of Liverpool researche…
The brilliant physicist Richard Feynman famously said that, in principle, biology can be explained by understanding the wiggling and jiggling of atoms. For the first time, new research from the Unive…
The platypus is the ultimate evolutionary mashup of birds, reptiles and mammals. The iconic, egg-laying, venom producing, duck-billed platypus first had its genome sequenced in 2008, revealing its un…
Bacteria and Archaea are two of the three domains of life. Both must have evolved from the putative Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). One hypothesis is that this happened because the cell membra…
As you picture the first fish to crawl out of primordial waters onto land, it's easy to imagine how its paired fins eventually evolved into the arms and legs of modern-day vertebrates, including …
An article published in the open-access journal GigaScience presents a draft genome of a small shrew-like animal, the venomous Hispaniolan solenodon (Solenodon paradoxus). This species is unusual no…
Like an island nation, the nucleus of a cell has a transportation problem. Evolution has enclosed it with a double membrane, the nuclear envelope, which protects DNA but also cuts it off from the res…
Scientists discovered another key to how DNA forms loops and wraps inside the cell nucleus -- a precise method of "packing" that may affect gene expression. Interior of a cell showing the n…
A new study published in the journal Communications Biology has shed light on the earliest stages in the evolution of male-female differentiation and sex chromosomes--and found the genetic origins o…
About 2 to 3 million years ago, a group of spiders let out long silk threads into the wind and set sail, so to speak, across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii. These spiders were parasites of other spiders…
New research by University of Alberta cellular biologists is putting into question existing theories about what's responsible for organizing a central part of our cells, known as the Golgi appara…
Ancient microbes may have been producing oxygen through photosynthesis a billion years earlier than we thought, which means oxygen was available for living organisms very close to the origin of life …
Primitive air-breathing fish, whose direct ancestors first appeared around 400 million years ago, show mechanisms controlling the heart which were previously considered to be found only in mammals --…
Evolutionary biologists have now discovered that the Pygmy Marmoset – the world’s smallest monkey – is not one species but two. Pygmy Marmoset [Credit: University of Salford] Weighing just 100 grams …
For over a century, speciation -- where one species splits into two -- has been a central focus of evolutionary research. But a new study almost 20 years in the making suggests "speciation rever…
An international team of researchers has produced one of the most comprehensive evolutionary pictures to date by looking at one of the world's most iconic animal families - namely elephants, and …
