The McGill University paleontologist, who died from COVID-19, was known for using multidisciplinary methods to explore the origins of amphibians, birds, and mammals.

Meet some of the people featured in the June 2020 issue of The Scientist.

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.

Three members of a gene family called NOTCH2NL may have been involved in the evolution of humans’ big cortex.

Researchers tweak gene expression in chicken embryos that may have been crucial to the evolutionary transition from dinosaur noses to bird bills.

The history of cetaceans can serve as a model for both evolutionary dynamics and interdisciplinary collaboration.

In the final chapter of his book on the origins of vertebrate sex, author and paleontologist John Long pays homage to the humble placoderm, which got the erotic ball rolling.

Bacteria that live in the digestive tracts of animals may influence the adaptive trajectories of their hosts.

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.

In the prologue to the book, author Neil Shubin sets the stage for discussing the iterative repurposing that marks several transformational developments throughout evolution.