Evolution

The most terrifying meat-eating dinosaurs suddenly went vegetarian

The theropod dinosaurs, like Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor, were some of the most fearsome carnivores ever. Yet most of these perfect hunters abandoned live prey in favor of a more peaceful, vegetarian existence…which started their evolution into birds. Researchers recently set out to determine the diet of 90 different theropod species. They were expecting to…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Dec 20

Genetic fossil record reveals the evolution of life 3 billion years ago

Life has been around for billions of years, but it’s only about 580 million years ago that organisms start leaving behind fossils. But our modern genes provide a window into the past, revealing how life developed billions of years ago. The genomes of modern organisms are all inherited from their ancestral counterparts, which basically means…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Dec 19

Cultural genome project mines Google Books for the secret history of humanity

What exactly is the half-life of celebrity? A new field called culturomics has the answer. Using the largest linguistic database ever created – Google Books – culturomics experts track things like “lexical dark matter,” and how long fame really lasts. Earlier today, we spoke to the two main minds behind the cultural genome, Harvard researchers…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Dec 16

Humans accidentally created giant, super-evolved vultures

About 2,500 years ago, humans settled on the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain. They brought plentiful livestock with them to the once barren islands, creating a whole new ecosystem – one that was perfect for super-sized vultures. The Egyptian vulture is found throughout southwestern Europe and northern Africa, although its population has declined…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Dec 13

Skin was the first organ to evolve

In the evolution of organs, skin came first. The discovery that even sponges have a proto-skin shows that the separation of insides from outsides in multicellular animals was key to their evolution. It has been known since the 1960s that sponges have a distinct outer layer of cells, or epithelium. But because sponges lack the…

io9 New Scientist Dec 12

Pandas are vegetarians because they lost the meat-eating gene

Pandas are famously peaceful creatures, content to sit around quietly eating bamboo. But millions of years ago, they were as fierce and carnivorous as the rest of their bear relatives. It’s all a question of changing environments and shifting genes. Genetic research into pandas by Jianzhi Zhang at the University of Michigan found that pandas…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Dec 5

19th century creationist used sexual perversion to explain bird evolution

The complex evolutionary relationships between birds and dinosaurs has only really started to become clear in the last 15 years. But one brave thinker in 1897 knew the real truth: it was all down to birds and reptiles doing it. Dinosaur Tracking has the story of W.T. Freeman, a 19th century naturalist who believed in…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Dec 3

Australian skink is caught evolving!

The yellow-bellied three-toed skink lays its eggs along the coast of southeastern Australia. The yellow-bellied three-toed skink gives birth to live young in the mountains of Australia. Same species — two different ways of reproducing. What’s going on here? Along the warmth of the coast, this long, spindly-legged lizard deposits its eggs where they can…

io9 Esther Inglis-Arkell Dec 2

Fight global warming or face the wrath of the dinosaurs

Three hundred million years ago there was a period of global warming. Two hundred million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the land, wreaking havok and spreading terror. Scientists think the two events were intimately linked. Around three hundred million years ago, the world was a very different place. North America and Europe had a firm grip…

io9 Esther Inglis-Arkell Nov 30

Why We Hiccup

Hiccups don’t serve a useful function anymore, but they were useful to our very ancient ancestors. Find out how early fish ‘hiccuped’ in order to breath underwater. Hiccups are a great way to ruin a good meal, a sad movie, or a first date. They’re annoying, sometimes painful, and completely useless. That is, they’re completely…

io9 Esther Inglis-Arkell Nov 30

Do women avoid talking to their fathers because of evolution?

Even for evolutionary psychology, this latest finding is really bizarre. Cell phone bills suggest women avoid talking to their fathers during periods of high fertility, which might be a relic of an evolutionary imperative to avoid mating with close relatives. Let’s take this one piece by piece to see if it gets any less bizarre.…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Nov 29

Are Humans Turning Into Gods?

Our friend Jason Silva—writer, filmmaker and founding host/producer of Current TV—is making a new documentary celebrating humans reaching their ultimate potential, the inexorable evolution that is turning us into gods. He’s quite optimistic about it. I’m not so sure-JD “First we build the tools, then they build us” – Marshall McLuhan Turning Into Gods is,…

Tech News Jason Silva Nov 29

Why dogs have bigger brains than cats

Being sociable has its advantages, including giving you – or at least your species – a bigger brain. Across more than 500 mammal species, animals that lived in social groups had bigger brains than those that lived by themselves. Evolutionary biologists had long assumed brain size increased in mammals in a more or less consistent…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Nov 28

The teeth of a 200 million years old reptile reveal how snakes got their fangs

Snakes and other creatures have been menacing the world with venomous fangs since the early days of the dinosaurs, but until now nobody quite knew how they got their most fearsome weapon. Now a paleontologist has solved this evolutionary mystery. Central to solving this mystery was the reptile Uatchitodon, a creature dating back to the…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Nov 28

Does a primitive part of our brains make us less interested in mates who lose fights?

Female members of one fish species show strong responses in a primitive part of her brain when she watches her chosen male lose in a fight. Humans might also possess this overwhelming evolutionary imperative to find the toughest, most combat-ready mates. The African cichlid fish has a particular part of its brain that fires up…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Nov 26

Why did mammals evolve to enormous sizes – then get smaller again?

After the dinosaurs were wiped out by a massive meteor strike 65 million years ago, tiny mammals ruled the Earth. But they quickly evolved to be as big as dinosaurs, then evolved to be smaller again. What happened? This is what paleontologists have long wondered. Scientists knew that extremely large mammals evolved within a few…

io9 Annalee Newitz Nov 25

The horrors of evolution: the 10 freakiest animals of speculative biology

Scottish geologist, illustrator, and speculative zoologist Dougal Dixon has made his career dreaming up dozens of fictional creatures shaped by evolution gone bonkers. Here are 10 of his creations who seemingly escaped from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. We’ve mentioned our love of Dixon’s never-was dinosaur menagerie before, but he’s worked on several projects…

io9 Cyriaque Lamar Nov 21

The weird evolutionary story of cranberries

This Thanksgiving, take your cranberry sauce with a dollop of irony. You’re eating cranberries mostly because cranberries stopped trying to get mammals to eat them. Although there are a few plants that migrate, the vast majority of them are stuck in one place. This saves on energy, but has many disadvantages. One of those disadvantages…

io9 Esther Inglis-Arkell Nov 20

Your genes may have very little to do with how you look

We already knew that creatures with very similar genomes, like humans and chimps, can be very different. Now it seems that creatures who look the same might have radically different genomes. Our post-human children may look like us after all. In a paper published today in Science, biologist France Denoeud and colleagues describe the strange…

io9 Annalee Newitz Nov 18

Were humans really using tools 3.4 million years ago?

Animal bones were recently discovered that suggested humans were using tools 3.4 million years ago – 800,000 years earlier than previously thought. But that finding is being challenged, and the story of human evolution hangs in the balance. Shannon McPherron and his team at the Max Planck Institute reported back in August that they had…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Nov 16

The most terrifying meat-eating dinosaurs suddenly went vegetarian

Genetic fossil record reveals the evolution of life 3 billion years ago

Cultural genome project mines Google Books for the secret history of humanity

Humans accidentally created giant, super-evolved vultures

Skin was the first organ to evolve

Pandas are vegetarians because they lost the meat-eating gene

19th century creationist used sexual perversion to explain bird evolution

Australian skink is caught evolving!

Fight global warming or face the wrath of the dinosaurs

Why We Hiccup

Do women avoid talking to their fathers because of evolution?

Are Humans Turning Into Gods?

Why dogs have bigger brains than cats

The teeth of a 200 million years old reptile reveal how snakes got their fangs

Does a primitive part of our brains make us less interested in mates who lose fights?

Why did mammals evolve to enormous sizes – then get smaller again?

The horrors of evolution: the 10 freakiest animals of speculative biology

The weird evolutionary story of cranberries

Your genes may have very little to do with how you look

Were humans really using tools 3.4 million years ago?

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