Tag Archives: evolutionary

The Strange 540-Million-Year-Old Fossil Shaking Up Evolutionary History  SciTechDaily Source link

Sign up for the Mini Philosophy newsletter A place to pause and reflect on life’s bigger questions, with Big Think’s Jonny Thomson. “The classic example of a hijack is masturbation,” Edward Slingerland tells me. We’re talking about all the evolutionary quirks that humans tend to exploit — the cases where we’re “built” for one purpose, but decide to put that …

A nearly complete fossil skeleton found on the U.K.’s Jurassic Coast represents a newly identified species of ancient marine reptile that lived alongside dinosaurs. The ichthyosaur, dubbed Xiphodracon goldencapsis, was likely around 10 feet (3 meters) long when it lived, according to a study published Friday (Oct. 10) in the journal Papers in Palaeontology. It had large eye sockets and …

A recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has revealed an extraordinary feature in the male spotted ratfish, a shark-like species inhabiting the sea off the northeastern Pacific coast. Researchers discovered that this fish possesses true teeth on a forehead appendage used in mating, overturning decades of assumptions about the exclusive oral location of vertebrate teeth. …

The psychedelic compound psilocybin has fascinated humans for years. It alters perception, expands consciousness, and is even being tested as a treatment for depression. However, researchers are still puzzled by the purpose of psilocybin for the fungi that produce it. A recent study has shown that different groups of mushrooms developed the ability to produce psilocybin on separate occasions. These …

Sample selection for genome sequencing Wild barley Our wild barley panel (Supplementary Table 1) comprised 285 accessions from the Wild Barley Diversity Collection (WBDC)41,42, a collection of ecogeographically diverse accessions. The whole-genome sequencing (WGS) of the WBDC collection has been described in a companion paper17. A further 95 diverse barley accessions, mainly from the panel of Russell et al.14, were …

Scientists have uncovered evidence that autism-linked genes evolved unusually quickly in humans, possibly shaping traits like prolonged brain development and language. These findings suggest that the same changes that made our brains unique may also explain human neurodiversity. Credit: Stock Autism-linked genes evolved rapidly in humans. They may have aided brain growth and language. A recent study published in Molecular …

AI-generated illustration. Credit: ZME Science/Midjourney. Human evolution has often been depicted as a process of adaptation, where natural selection and genetic changes drive species toward better-suited traits for survival in their environments. But this long-held view may be missing a major force in human evolution: culture. A new theory is shaking up that conventional wisdom, suggesting that our evolution is …

There’s a problem with that “March of Progress” picture that’s so often used to illustrate our species’ development: it ends. Human evolution, the image implies, began in apehood and finishes here, with us. We’re done. It’s poetic, but it’s wrong. Evolution, famously, has no end goal – and there’s no reason to assume we’re already at the pinnacle of our …

While developing his theory of natural selection, Charles Darwin was horrified by a group of wasps that lay their eggs within the bodies of caterpillars, with the larvae eating their hosts alive from the inside-out. Darwin didn’t judge the wasps. Instead, he was troubled by what they revealed about evolution. They showed natural selection to be an amoral process. Any …