Tag archives for evolution
Posted by With their feathery arms and long stalks, sea lilies look like their land-based namesakes. But unlike the lilies of the land, sea lilies are able to pick up and move. Over 200 million years of being eaten by sea urchins they have evolved escape strategies, including pulling themselves out of reach along the ocean floor. The…
By genetically altering fruit flies so that the heads of their sperm were fluorescent green or red, scientists were able to observe “in striking detail what happens to live sperm inside the female”, Syracuse University reported today. “Our jaws hit the floor the first time we looked through a microscope and saw these glowing sperm.…
Competition among male side-blotched lizards takes the form of a rock-paper-scissors game in which each mating strategy beats and is beaten by one other strategy, research has shown. Barry Sinervo, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California in Santa Cruz (UCSC), has monitored the mating game in a population of…
Mass extinctions have devastated biodiversity many times over the past 540 million years, according to scientists. After each cataclysmic event the species that survived diversified and filled the planet with life again. Until now the fossil record supported the theory that species that survived extinction events–which ranged from meteorite impacts to an eruptions of super…
Genographic Test Reveals Darwin’s Ancestry
Posted by Ford Cochran on February 4, 2010 A Genographic cheek swab test on Chris Darwin—great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, author of On the Origin of Species—has revealed the deep ancestry of the so-called “Father of Evolution.” National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Spencer Wells revealed the test results today in Sydney, Australia, at the annual meeting of scientists leading Genographic Project field investigations around the world.…
Genographic Test Reveals Darwin’s Ancestry
Posted by Ford Cochran on February 4, 2010 A Genographic cheek swab test on Chris Darwin—great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, author of On the Origin of Species—has revealed the deep ancestry of the so-called “Father of Evolution.” National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Spencer Wells revealed the test results today in Sydney, Australia, at the annual meeting of scientists leading Genographic Project field investigations around the world.…
Two hundred years after the birth of Charles Darwin, the “Father of Evolution,” DNA technology has helped determine who his ancient ancestors were. Portrait of Charles Darwin as a young man. DNA samples from his descendant have revealed the deep ancestry of the “Father of Evolution.” Photograph by James L. Stanfield Darwin’s great-great-grandson, Chris Darwin,…
Feeding birds can have profound effects on their future and perhaps even create new species in a relatively short span opf time, German scientists report. According to research published in the current edition of the journal Current Biology, what was once a single population in central Europe of birds known as blackcaps has been split into…
On the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, today, November 24, Charles Darwin’s revolutionary, evolutionary ideas are still shaping modern science as it moves into the future. In a lecture tonight, Webcast for the global audience, leading minds Terrence Deacon (anthropology), Gerald Edelman (neurobiology) and Paul Ekman (psychology) celebrate Darwin and explain how…
By James G. Robertson The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has new pictures of the worms we wrote about in September, and the number of species identified by scientists has increased from nine to as many as 17. The researchers have also published some insight into how the worms get food from the bones of dead…
By James G. Robertson, National Geographic Digital Media Scientists have finished a three-year project decoding the genome of the horse and have found something about the human genome in the process. The researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University found lots of similarities between the DNA of a horse and that of…
As we observe the 150th anniversary this month of the first publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a new book reviews evolution and ranks the top one hundred most influential species of all time. Homo sapiens is not at the top of the list. In fact, we humans, who like to imagine…
Explore evolution in a way Charles Darwin couldn’t imagine–by delving into the DNA evidence of each species’ unique evolutionary journey. Geneticist and author Sean B. Carroll will explain how DNA holds a living record of the evolutionary adaptations that allow species to evolve and thrive in diverse environments all over the Earth. By Brian Handwerk,…
Female orangutans are forced to copulate against their will more frequently than has been observed in any other mammal. Scientists have generally believed that this is because females spurn mating with inferior “unflanged” males. Rejected males have no chance to mate unless they use coercion–or so it was thought. But new studies, using the first…
Social carnivores like spotted hyenas that hunt in packs may be good models for testing theories about the mechanisms of social learning and the evolution of intelligence, suggest scientists who tested hyenas with food-reward tasks that modeled group hunting strategies. Hyenas outperformed primates when it came to problems that required teamwork, the scientists found. Photo…
Our ancestors underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution over more than a million years before “Lucy”, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago,” National Geographic Magazine science editor Jamie Shreeve reports today. The finding, published in tomorrow’s journal Science, is based on the discovery of the oldest…
By James G. Robertson, National Geographic Digital Media Imagine having to wait for a whale to drop from the sky before you could eat. At least nine new species of bristleworms that have adapted to feed from the unpredictable food source of dead whales have been discovered by Swedish scientists, according to a release from…
Travel back in time to visit “The World Before Darwin,” courtesy of a free webcast lecture with Everett Mendelsohn, emeritus professor at Harvard University. Mendelsohn explored the milieu in which Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” 150 years ago, reveal its other evolutionary thinkers, and shed light on skeptics from the worlds of religion and…
Hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life joined a Facebook group devoted to the celebration of this year’s 200th anniversary of the birth of the “Father of Evolution,” Charles Darwin. Now the organizers of the Facebook group are hoping hundreds of thousands more will sign up to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publishing…
Autumn leaves of trees in North America often turn red. But in Europe the leaves mostly go yellow. Scientists think that the regional difference can be explained by the geographic orientation of each continent’s mountains. NGS photo by Robert Sisson A new theory provided by Simcha Lev-Yadun of the Department of Science Education-Biology at the…
Why is sex the dominant form of reproduction on the planet? Scientists think they know why–and it all has to do with evasion of parasites. NGS photo of elephants mating by Michael Nichols Sex may have evolved in part as a defense against parasites, an article published in the July issue of the academic journal…
The Splendid White-eye (Zosterops splendidus) is found only on the tiny island of Ranongga and is one of seven species endemic to islands of the New Georgia Group, Solomon Islands. C. Filardi/CBC-AMNH Birds within the family Zosteropidae — named white-eyes for the feathers that frame their eyes — evolve at a faster rate than any…
An adult male of the pink iguana from the Galápagos on the rim of the crater of Volcan Wolf. The newly recognized species of iguana may already be endangered and could become extinct, scientists warn. Photo courtesy of Gabriele Gentile Had Charles Darwin explored the Volcan Wolf volcano when he visited the Galápagos in 1835…
All photos by Cagan Sekercioglu Why do some bird species lay only one egg in their nest, and others ten? The substantial variation in number of eggs in the nest (clutch size) between bird species has long puzzled behavioral, ecological, and evolutionary biologists. One method to explain it focused on the biology of species, such…
Photo by James L Stanfield/NGS To all the differences between cats and dogs, add another: They have evolved completely different locomotion efficiencies based on what has given them hunting success. Duke University scientists studied how cats move when they stalk prey, a slow-motion gait that cautiously places one foot in front of the other. “If…
