Biomineralized columns, stacked in layers like a sandwich gave Cambrian brachiopod shells their strength and flexibility 520 million years ago ..read more

Evidence in lampreys for the presence of a rudimentary sympathetic nervous system, previously thought to be unique to jawed vertebrates, has been presented in Nature. The finding may prompt a rethink of the origins of the sympathetic nervous system, which operates without conscious thought and controls the fight or flight reaction ..read more

Humans, Homo sapiens, have unique features compared with other closely related hominin species and primates, including the shape of the base of the skull. The evolutionary changes underlying these features were significant in allowing the evolution of our increased brain size ..read more

Lost your keys? Can't remember where you parked the car? If only you had the memory of a mountain chickadee ..read more

Competition between species played a major role in the rise and fall of hominins—and produced a "bizarre" evolutionary pattern for the Homo lineage—according to a new University of Cambridge study that revises the start and end dates for many of our early ancestors ..read more

If evolution was originally depicted as a tree, with different species branching off as new blooms, then new research shows how the branches may actually be more entangled. In "Hybrid speciation driven by multilocus introgression of ecological traits," published in Nature, Harvard researchers show that hybrids between species of butterflies can produce new species that are genetically distinct from both parent species and their earlier forebears ..read more

Marine communities migrated to Antarctica during the Earth's warmest period in 66 million years long before a mass-extinction event ..read more

From microbes in the human gut to symbiotic algae in coral reefs, research in recent decades has increasingly revealed the pivotal roles that microorganisms (or microbial species) play in shaping the biology of host organisms and of broader ecosystems. For example, some endosymbionts—microbes that live within the cells of a host organism—are known to manipulate the physiology of their hosts to promote their own persistence from generation to generation ..read more

An international research team has investigated the biosynthesis of psilocybin, the main ingredient of hallucinogenic mushrooms. They gained new insights into the structure and reaction mechanism of the enzyme PsiM. It plays a key role in the production of psilocybin. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications ..read more

Some Australian desert mammals use distinct strategies to promote evolutionary fitness in response to changing environmental conditions over short timescales, according to a new study ..read more