evolution

The land’s first known singer may have sounded like a raspier version of today’s familiar insect fiddlers.

In a chapter entitled “Predators, Silence, Wings,” author David George Haskell explores the soundscapes of bygone eras of animal communication.

Researchers engineered strands of RNA that can link amino acids together, suggesting a way that RNA and proteins may have emerged together to create the earliest forms of life.

The work reveals that the pandemic flu was likely the direct predecessor of the seasonal H1N1 flu that circulated for decades.

The behavior is the first example of a mammal mimicking a more-dangerous species.

Once thought to be silent, fish turn out to produce a range of vocalizations—so polluting the oceans with noise could pose a danger to them.

New techniques have shown that people reached the New World far earlier than the long-standing estimate of 13,000 years ago, but scientists still debate exactly when humans arrived on the continent—and how.

Diverse lines of evidence point to humans’ presence in the New World long before the dawn of Clovis culture. But rewriting this chapter of human history raises many questions about how these early people came to inhabit these continents.

Researchers tracked the movements of endangered caribou and sequenced a portion of their genomes to determine which genes may influence migratory behavior.

Nearly all mouse sperm have hooks on their heads. But new research suggests the structures slow them down—so what exactly is their purpose?

The discovery could add weight to the hypothesis that the building blocks of life on Earth originally came from space, but some scientists note the possibility of contamination.

The University of East Anglia researcher was best known for his contributions to the study of sexual selection, particularly post-copulatory sperm competition.

Contrary to what researchers had assumed, Egyptian fruit bats don’t rely solely on sight to orient themselves as they drink and forage for food in daylight. 

Assumed to have gone extinct more than 30 years ago, Gasteranthus extinctus has been rediscovered by scientists working in Ecuador.

In Chapter 7, “More Remarkable Encounters,” author Gregory Forth relays a story told to him by Tegu, a Lio man who says he found and disposed of a dead organism that might fit the description of an "ape-man."

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne evolutionary neurobiologist is using Drosophila to investigate how organisms adapt to novel environments.

Do members of Homo floresiensis still inhabit the Indonesian island where their fossils helped identify a new human species fewer than 20 years ago?

Experimentally nudging the patterning within the compound eyes of insects.

A study in mice finds that for certain genes, one parent’s allele can dominate expression and shape behavior—and which parent’s allele does so varies throughout the body.

The Scientist spoke with Ohio State University microbiologist Matthew Sullivan about a recent expedition that identified thousands of RNA viruses from water samples and cataloged them into novel phylogenic groups.