DNA from a 22,000-year-old fossilized panda skull suggests an entirely separate lineage of giant pandas once roamed the area that is now southern China.

It’s nice to think we’re part of something bigger. And we are, really—in a cosmic, evolutionary sense.

When separates us from the animals? Is it the burden of consciousness, the terror of knowing that one day we will die, along with everyone we’ve ever loved? Or is it our big weird asses?

Modern filter-feeding baleen whales use comb-like structures in their mouths to scoop up large volumes of itsy-bitsy animals and microorganisms. But as new research reveals, their ancestors were remarkably different, featuring sharp teeth that they used to attack prey.

In a scientific first, researchers have used an MRI scanner to study the brains of Nile crocodiles. Sounds weird—and even a bit dangerous—but the experiment is revealing new insights into the evolution of brains and how mammals and birds acquired the capacity to comprehend complex sounds.

Scientists in Israel have observed a strange behavior among brown widow spiders: When given the choice, the males of this species prefer to have sex with older females even though they’re less likely to bear offspring. More problematically, these older females are also more inclined to devour their partners after…

The scientists who discovered the strange feature are calling it a “lachrymal saber,” but for the predators who dare to mess with this type of stonefish, the unique switchblade just means trouble.

Paleontologists working along the UK’s southwest coast have unearthed a 205-million-year-old jawbone that belonged to an absolutely enormous species of ichthyosaur, a very successful group of aquatic reptiles. At approximately 85 feet in length, these monsters were one of the largest animals to have ever appeared on…

Compared to modern humans, Neanderthals had heavy eyebrows, huge noses, and large, long faces that bulged forward. Using 3D computer models, an international team of scientists has analyzed these facial features in detail, uncovering some likely explanations for these dramatic physical differences.

An ancient species of monitor lizard that went extinct some 34 million years ago had four eyes, according to new research. It’s the first time that scientists have ever seen such a thing in a jawed terrestrial animal—an observation that’s filling a gap in our understanding of how these features evolved.

Cockroaches have been one of humanity’s most unwanted, yet admirably persistent, roommates for thousands of years. But despite our reluctant intimacy, there’s still a lot we don’t understand about these insects. A new study, published today in Nature Communication, unpacks the genes that make roaches tick—and helps…

Environments make species. This was the fundamental biology lesson that was drilled into Charles Darwin when he visited the Galápagos Islands back in 1835, a trip that ultimately inspired his theory of natural selection. Nearly 200 years later, scientists in Hawaii have stumbled upon a fascinating evolutionary quirk…

The history of elephants—from gigantic woolly mammoths through to modern forest-dwelling pachyderms—is more complicated than we thought. An analysis of modern and ancient elephant genomes shows that interbreeding and hybridization was an important aspect of elephant evolution.

Rabbits are a treasured source of companionship, entertainment, and—if you’re living most anywhere besides the U.S.—food. But a new analysis published Wednesday in Cell Press Reviews suggests that whether you turn to folk tales or DNA, there’s no easy way to tell when rabbits actually became part of our domesticated…

Say hello to Mansourasaurus shahinae, a 14,000-pound titanosaur that rumbled across the African landscape during the final days of the dinosaurs. Its discovery is answering a long-standing mystery about dinosaur evolution at a time when Earth’s continents began drifting further and further apart.