During these waves of mass extinction, most vertebrate survivors were confined to refugia, or isolated biodiversity hotspots ...

About 445 million years ago, Earth nearly wiped out life in the oceans. Glaciers spread across the supercontinent Gondwana, ...

Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis occurred, where life emerged from non-life. Imagine a hot, watery mix of ...

The completion of a South American lung fish genome sequencing represents one of the most remarkable moments within current genetic research. Because .

Editor's note: All opinions, columns and letters reflect the views of the individual writer and not necessarily those of the IDS or its staffers. We’ve all seen this poster in our middle school ...

The oldest fossilised remains of complex animals appear suddenly in the fossil record, and as if from nowhere, in rocks that ...

The modern world offers an abundance of convenience foods. But our Stone Age physiology isn't built for modern diets, which ...

According to new research recently published in the journal Nature Communications, the Greenland shark retained its visual ...

The story of how us humans—and other mammals—got our noses may have just gotten more complicated. This is the conclusion of a new study by researchers from Japan who have studied how the face develops ...

If you're reading this sentence, you might have a fish to thank. Fish were the first animals to evolve jaws. They use their jaws primarily to eat, but also for defense, as tools—such as to burrow or ...

Two of the traits that set modern humans apart from non-human primates are taller stature and a higher basal metabolic rate. Researchers have identified a genetic variant that contributed to the ...

To get to the bottom of it, they looked at the fish’s anatomy and physiology and discovered something curious in their gills.