A handful of new studies moves the needle toward a consensus on the long-disputed question of whether insect wings evolved from legs or from the body wall, but the devil is in the details.
Many species of birds and other vertebrates form pair bonds and mate with just one other individual for much of their lives. But the unions don’t always work out. Scientists want to know the underlying factors.
From detecting gravity and the Earth’s magnetic field to feeling heat and the movement of water around them, animals can do more than just see, smell, touch, taste, and hear.
Distantly related, lookalike Heliconius species arrive at the same appearance using the same few genes, but regulated differently, according to recent studies.
If the structures identified in a 2.1-billion-year-old rock are really signs of burrowing organisms, it would push back the earliest known mobile organisms by 1.5 billion years.
These tiny reef fish harbor luminous bacteria, and the chromosome-level assembly of the species’ genome may facilitate the duo’s use as a vertebrate model for symbiosis.