Cicadas climb up a tree at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., during the Brood X emergence in 2021. Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images In the wake of North America’s recent solar eclipse, another historic natural event is on the horizon. From late April through June 2024, the largest brood of 13-year cicadas, known as Brood XIX, will co-emerge with a midwestern brood of 17-year cicadas, Brood XIII. This event will affect 17 states, from Maryland west to Iowa and south into Arkansas, Alabama and northern Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Maryland. A co-emergence like this of tw ..read more

Ryan Boedi/Shutterstock The largest-ever study of bird genomes has produced a remarkably clear picture of the bird family tree. Published in the journal Nature today, our study shows that most of the modern groups of birds first appeared within 5 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Birds are a large part of our lives, a sign of nature even in cities. They are popular among the general public and well studied by scientists. But placing all of these birds into a family tree has been frustratingly difficult. By analysing the genomes of more than 360 bird species, our study has id ..read more

People have collected fossil horses throughout North America for centuries. Florida Museum/Mary Warrick Many people assume that horses first came to the Americas when Spanish explorers brought them here about 500 years ago. In fact, recent research has confirmed a European origin for horses associated with humans in the American Southwest and Great Plains. But those weren’t the first horses in North America. The family Equidae, which includes domesticated varieties of horses and donkeys along with zebras and their kin, is actually native to the Americas. The fossil record reveals horse origins ..read more

Rock art showing a hunter-gatherer ritual dance; Kondoa, Tanzania Nick Longrich Why did humans take over the world while our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, became extinct? It’s possible we were just smarter, but there’s surprisingly little evidence that’s true. Neanderthals had big brains, language and sophisticated tools. They made art and jewellery. They were smart, suggesting a curious possibility. Maybe the crucial differences weren’t at the individual level, but in our societies. Two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, Europe and western Asia were Neanderthal lands. Homo sapiens i ..read more

Eve – Lucas Cranach the Elder (c.1510) Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons American essayist Cat Bohannon loves a bit of pop culture to contextualise her ideas. Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution – her ambitious, funny, intelligent history of female evolution – is threaded with it. The book opens with a futuristic scene from Prometheus, the 2012 prequel to Alien. Archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw is in an AI surgery pod, seeking a life-saving caesarean (she has been impregnated with an alien squid) when an affectless voice gives her an error message: “This medpod i ..read more

Males are bigger than females, right? Generally, this is true of humans – imagine the extremes of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and singer Kylie Minogue. It is also true of other familiar mammals including pets, such as cats and dogs, and livestock such as sheep and cows. But a new study by US scientist Kaia Tombak and colleagues found that, in many mammal species, males are not larger than females. In fact, in a comparison of 429 species in the wild, 50% of species including rodents and some bats – which make up a large proportion of all mammal species – showed no difference in body size between ..read more

Unlike humans, many animals still have tails. vblinov/Shutterstock Put the word “evolution” into Google images and the results are largely variations on one theme: Ralph Zallinger’s illustration, March of Progress. Running left to right, we see a chimp-like knuckle walker gradually becoming taller and standing erect. Implicit in such images – and the title of the picture – are biases in common views of evolution: that we are some sort of peak, the perfected product of the process. We imagine we are indeed the fittest survivors, the very best we can be. But seen that way, there’s a paradox. If ..read more

James Dorey Photography After a decade searching for new species of bees in forests of the Pacific Islands, all we had to do was look up. We soon found eight new species of masked bees in the forest canopy: six in Fiji, one in French Polynesia and another in Micronesia. Now we expect to find many more. Forest-dwelling bees evolved for thousands of years alongside native plants, and play unique and important roles in nature. Studying these species can help us better understand bee evolution, diversity and conservation. Almost 21,000 bee species are known to science. Many more remain undiscover ..read more

Bacteria are evolutionarily primed to outpace drug developers. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health/Flickr, CC BY-NC Do bacteria mutate randomly, or do they mutate for a purpose? Researchers have been puzzling over this conundrum for over a century. In 1943, microbiologist Salvador Luria and physicist turned biologist Max Delbrück invented an experiment to argue that bacteria mutated aimlessly. Using their test, other scientists showed that bacteria could acquire resistance to antibiotics they hadn’t encountered before. The Luria–Delbrück experim ..read more

Bernard Spragg/Flickr They can recover from fire. Grow back from a bare stump. Shrug aside bark loss that would kill a lesser tree. Endure drought and floods. Eucalypts are not interested in dying. They’re survivors. The world’s 800-plus species are almost all found in Australia, a continent with old, degraded soils and frequent fires and droughts. In the fossil record, they first appear about 34 million years ago. As the Australian continent dried out, eucalypts gradually emerged as the dominant trees in all but the most arid and tropical areas. But what is it about eucalypts that makes them ..read more