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| METEORITES A RICH SOURCE FOR PRIMORDIAL SOUP |
| Washington, DC—The organic soup that spawned life on Earth may have gotten generous helpings from outer space, according to a new study. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have discovered concentrations of amino acids in two meteorites that are more than ten times higher than levels previously measured in other similar meteorites. This result suggests that the early solar system was far richer in the organic building blocks of life than scientists had thought, and that fallout from space may have spiked Earth’s primordial broth. |
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| HUMAN EVOLUTION AT THE CROSSROADS: INTEGRATING GENETICS AND PALEONTOLOGY |
| Advances in genetics during the last decade not only have influenced modern medicine, they also have changed how human evolution is studied, says an anthropologist from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. |
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| ANCIENT INSECTS BUZZ INTO HISTORY BOOKS |
| Scientists have discovered the remains of a 400 million-year-old insect, the oldest ever located, in a fossil unearthed in Scotland in the early 1900s. |
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| CAVE-DWELLING MICHAELANGELOS |
| Three tiny figurines carved out of mammoth ivory, unearthed in a cave in southwestern Germany, have demonstrated that Early Man was far from primitive in his artistic skills. |
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| WORLD'S OLDEST MARSUPIAL FOUND IN CHINA |
| An exquisitely preserved 125 million-year-old fossil found in China has set a new record for the oldest known marsupial and may rewrite the history of mammal evolution, a new report suggests. |
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| ANCIENT MUTANT POLLEN OUT FOR THE COUNT |
| Conifer tree pollen from 250 million years ago show the same mutations as those of modern pines hit by fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, a new study has found. |
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| WHAT CAN THE GENOMICS REVOLUTION TEACH US ABOUT GLOBAL CHANGE? |
| While the scientific community has made tremendous investments in sequencing and interpreting animal and plant genes for biomedical applications, many researchers are looking at genomics to help solve problems in agriculture, such as impacts of global change. |
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| GIANT MAMMALS CAUSE PREHISTORY RETHINK |
| Two of the world's lost prehistoric giants, a rhino-sized Australian marsupial and a buffalo-sized South American rodent, were the largest known mammals of their kind and much larger than previously thought, according to two new studies. |
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| GENES CAN EXPLAIN CONVERGENT EVOLUTION |
| Convergent evolution - the explanation for different species evolving common solutions to the same problems, even though they have distinctly different ancestors - has been found to result from just a handful of genes. |
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| DEEP CARBON COULD TRIGGER MASS EXTINCTION |
| A vast reservoir of carbon is stashed beneath the Earth's crust and could be released by a major volcanic eruption, unleashing a mass extinction of the kind that last occurred 200 million years ago, German geologists report. |
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| DINOSAURS DOOMED EVEN BEFORE IMPACT: SCIENTISTS |
| The dinosaurs were probably heading for extinction even before an asteroid strike wiped them out 65 million years ago, argue New Zealand scientists. |
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| SEX: DO WE REALLY NEED IT? |
| Birds do it, bees do it, humans do it - but nobody knows why sex evolved at all, the world congress of genetics heard in Melbourne today. |
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| ANOTHER METEOR STRIKE BLAMED FOR EXTINCTIONS |
| A large meteorite collided 380 million years ago into what is now the Moroccan desert and may have caused one of the five known mass extinctions of life on Earth, researchers report. |
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| SCIENTISTS USE DNA FRAGMENTS TO TRACE THE MIGRATION OF MODERN HUMANS |
| Human beings may have made their first journey out of Africa as recently as 70,000 years ago, according to a new study by geneticists from Stanford University and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Writing in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the researchers estimate that the entire population of ancestral humans at the time of the African expansion consisted of only about 2,000 individuals. |
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| TREES AND FLOWERS MORE AKIN THAN DISSIMILAR, RESEARCH SHOWS. |
| Harvesting wood from weeds? Coaxing lumber from lobelias? Those possibilities aren’t as far-fetched as you might think. |
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| WHY HUMANS LOST THEIR SENSE OF SMELL |
| Humans rapidly lost much of their sense of smell as they evolved to place a heavier emphasis on their sense of sight, according to a recent genetics study. |
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| EXTINCT REPTILE SPECIES LIVED ON IN AUSTRALIA |
| An ancient hippo-like reptile, extinct elsewhere, existed in Australia for another 110 million years – alongside the dinosaurs that wiped them out in other places, palaeontologists have found. |
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| SCIENTISTS FIND EVIDENCE FOR CRUCIAL ROOT IN THE HISTORY OF PLANT EVOLUTION |
| If ancient plants had not migrated from the shallow seas of early Earth to the barren land of the continents, life as we know it might never have emerged. And now it appears this massive floral colonization may have been spurred by a single genetic mutation that allowed primitive plants to make lignin, a chemical process that leads to the formation of a cell wall. |
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| PINE TREES MAY HELP CREATE SMOG, ACID RAIN |
| Rather than being a global warming solution, pine trees may be inducing smog and acid rain by releasing vast amounts of nitrogen oxide into the air, researchers have discovered. |
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| SEX AND GENDER SCIENTISTS EXPLORE A REVOLUTION IN EVOLUTION |
| Sex and gender scientists explore a revolution in evolution. Darwin may have been wrong about sex. Or at least too narrow minded.
At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, leading researchers and theorists in the evolution of sexual behavior will gather to present the growing evidence that Darwin's idea of sexual selection requires sweeping revisions. |
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| RESEARCHERS HELP TRACE ORIGIN OF MADAGASCAR’S MAMMALS. RESEARCH ANSWERS ONE OF NATURAL HISTORY'S MOST INTRACTABLE QUESTIONS. |
| All of Madagascar's living Carnivora (an order of mammals that includes dogs, cats, bears, hyenas and their relatives) descended from a single species that dispersed from Africa to Madagascar, apparently floating across the ocean barrier aboard wayward vegetation about 24 million to 18 million years ago. Previously, scientists believed that Madagascar's seven living species of native Carnivora represented two to four separate lineages, which would have implied that these animals colonized the island independently several times. |
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| GLOBAL WARMING TRIGGERS CHANGE IN SQUIRREL GENES |
| Animals have been observed changing their genetic make-up in response to global warming for the first time, according to Canadian researchers. |
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| PREHISTORIC TUSKS POINT TO EARLIEST FOSSIL EVIDENCE OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SEXES. FINDINGS POINT TO COMPLEX SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR. |
| The large tusks of an animal that roamed Earth before the dinosaurs may provide the earliest evidence yet of male-female distinctions in land animals that existed millions of years ago, say U of T scientists. |
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| PALAEONTOLOGISTS IN A FLAP OVER FOUR-WINGED DINOSAURS |
| The discovery of fossils in China with feathers on both their front and hind limbs has given the 'gliding' theory of the origins of flight an enormous boost. |
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| 'THE END OF THE WORLD' HAS ALREADY BEGUN, UW SCIENTISTS SAY |
| In its 4.5 billion years, Earth has evolved from its hot, violent birth to the celebrated watery blue planet that stands out in pictures from space. But in a new book, two noted University of Washington astrobiologists say the planet already has begun the long process of devolving into a burned-out cinder, eventually to be swallowed by the sun. |
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| DINOSAURS EXPERIENCED CLIMATE CHANGES BEFORE K-T COLLISION |
| Climate change had little to do with the demise of the dinosaurs, but the last million years before their extinction had a complex pattern of warming and cooling events that are important to our understanding of the end of their reign, according to geologists. |
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| LIFE MAY HAVE EMERGED FROM ROCKS |
| A major new theory argues that life began in tiny cavities in rocks that acted like cells - challenging the established view that it began as self-replicating molecules floating in the chemical soup of the early Earth. |
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| MARS METEORS MORE COMMON THAN THOUGHT |
| Martian meteorites can reach Earth much more easily than first suspected, according to a new U.S.-Russian study, strengthening the case for theories that life on Earth may have originated on the red planet. |
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| LIVING DINOSAURS |
| If we are to believe the message of a new exhibit demonstrating the evolutionary transition from dinosaurs to birds, dinosaurs are not extinct. |
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| SCIENTIST SAYS OSTRICH STUDY CONFIRMS BIRD 'HANDS' UNLIKE THOSE OF DINOSAURS |
| To make an omelet, you need to break some eggs. Not nearly so well known is that breaking eggs also can lead to new information about the evolution of birds and dinosaurs, a topic of hot debate among leading biologists. |
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| A HEADY DISCOVERY |
| A seven-million-year-old human skull has been found in the African republic of Chad.
Christened 'Toumai', which means 'hope of life' in the local Goran language, the find is said to be the most important fossil discovery in living memory. |
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| LIFE: DID IT COME FROM OUTER SPACE? |
| The building blocks of life on Earth may have come from giant clouds of icy dust deep in outer space, astronomers have told an international astrobiology conference in Australia. |
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| NEW CELLULAR EVOLUTION THEORY REJECTS DARWINIAN ASSUMPTIONS |
| Life did not begin with one primordial cell. Instead, there were initially at least three simple types of loosely constructed cellular organizations. They swam in a pool of genes, evolving in a communal way that aided one another in bootstrapping into the three distinct types of cells by sharing their evolutionary inventions. |
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| NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS EVIDENCE FOR EARLIEST LIFE ON EARTH. U.S. AND SWEDISH SCIENTISTS SUGGEST A NON-BIOLOGICAL ORIGIN FOR CARBON IN ANCIENT ROCKS. |
| New geological and geochemical data call into question recent claims for fossil life on Earth greater than 3.8 billion years ago, say researchers from The George Washington University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History in the May 24 issue of the journal Science. Such claims have been based on interpreting the sensitive biochemical behaviour of carbon, the principal element of life, and its relationship with the rocks in which the carbon is found. |
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| RESEARCHERS DISCOVER CLUES TO WHALE EVOLUTION |
| A team of international scientists, including Hans Thewissen, an anatomist and paleontologist at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine (NEOUCOM), has discovered that the inner ear of whales evolved much more quickly than expected, allowing the animals to become fully aquatic early in their evolution. |
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| UF EXPERT: ANCIENT FOSSIL SUGGESTS FLOWERS MAY BE UNDERWATER GIFT |
| The world’s oldest known flower never bloomed, but it has opened scientific questioning into whether all of today’s flowering plants had their origins from beneath ancient waters, says a University of Florida researcher. |
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| SCIENTISTS PUSH BACK PRIMATE ORIGINS FROM 65 MILLION TO 85 MILLION YEARS AGO. FIELD MUSEUM SCIENTIST CHALLENGES ACCEPTED THEORIES, DATING METHODS. |
| New research that accounts for gaps in the fossil record challenges traditional methods of interpreting fossils and constructing evolutionary trees. Applying a new statistical approach to primates demonstrates that this group-from which humans developed-originated 85 million years ago (Mya) rather than 65 Mya, as is widely accepted. |
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| ORGIN OF MYSTERIOUS SUBTERRANEAN GASES IDENTIFIED, SAYS UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO RESEARCHER |
| Evidence of gases similar to those that may have played a part in the formation of the earliest life on the planet has been found by a University of Toronto geochemist. |
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| HUMAN ANCESTOR AUSTRALOPITHECUS DID INDEED WALK UPRIGHT |
| Was Australopithecus ancestral to humans? Were they merely cousins in the evolutionary chain? Or simply a stage between apes and humans? Among various debates about these early hominids is the argument whether or not they could stand and walk upright like people do. |
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| A FASTER EVOLUTIONARY CLOCK? |
| A discovery by scientists studying ancient DNA from Antarctic penguins may change our understanding of how fast the tree of life grew.
New Zealand scientist, Dr David M. Lambert, and colleagues report in this week's Science on a new method of measuring the rate of DNA evolution. |
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| HUMANS LIVE A DOG'S LIFE |
| A new theory claims that many human behaviours are a result of our long-standing relationship with dogs, and vice versa. |
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| UCLA SCIENTISTS, COLLEAGUES SUBSTANTIATE BIOLOGICAL ORIGIN OF EARLIEST FOSSILS |
| UCLA paleobiologist J. William Schopf and colleagues have substantiated the biological origin of the earliest known cellular fossils, which are 3.5 billion years old. The research is published in the March 7 issue of the journal Nature. |
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| CATACLYSM 3.9 BILLION YEARS AGO WAS CAUSED BY ASTEROIDS, NOT COMETS, RESEARCHERS SAY |
| The bombardment that resurfaced the Earth 3.9 billion years ago was produced by asteroids, not comets, according to David Kring of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and Barbara Cohen, formerly at the UA and now with the University of Hawaii. Their findings appear today in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Planets, published by the American Geophysical Union. |
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| UNDERGRAD FINDS CLUES TO 400- MILLION-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY |
| Steven Porter, a Johns Hopkins University senior from Cherry Hill, N.J., has conducted original research that adds new and potentially decisive evidence to a debate about the identity of one of the first organisms to make the epochal leap from the sea to dry land approximately 400 million years ago. |
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| ALIEN LIFE FORMS MORE LIKELY TO BE FOUND OUTSIDE SOLAR SYSTEM, SAYS COLORADO PROF |
| The chance of detecting life outside our own solar system probably is greater than discovering it on neighboring planets and moons like Mars or Europa, a moon of Jupiter, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder professor. |
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| SCIENTISTS LOOK TO EUROPE AS EVOLUTIONARY SEAT |
| U of T anthropologist David Begun and his European colleagues are re-writing the book on the history of great apes and humans, arguing that most of their evolutionary development took place in Eurasia, not Africa. |
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| 343 MILLION YEARS OF PRIMATE AND CARNIVORE EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY AT RISK |
| Washington, D.C. – Scientists have discovered that the greatest concentration of all primate and carnivore evolutionary history exists within those species found only in the 25 biodiversity hotspots. These species – whose combined evolutionary ages total 343 million years – represent genetic lineages that are vital to the future diversity, evolution and survival of these animals according a collaborative study published by the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science (CABS) at Conservation International and biologists from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in the Feb. 19 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). |
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| GENETIC MARKER TELLS SQUASH DOMESTICATION STORY |
| In the January 8 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), The Cucurbit Network and the University of Puerto Rico establish mitochondrial DNA analysis as a powerful tool for understanding relationships among flowering plants. |
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| STANFORD RESEARCHERS DEVELOP SYSTEM FOR FIELD TESTING MECHANISMS OF EVOLUTION |
| Evolutionary biology has always faced a major hurdle - how to test a process that takes place over thousands, if not millions, of years. Researchers at Stanford University may have come up with a solution. |
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| MORE EVIDENCE FOR 'NANOBES' |
| An Australian researcher may have quietly strengthened the evidence for extra-terrestrial life last week at — of all things — a micro-electronics conference.
Dr Philippa Uwins of the University of Queensland announced at a conference in Adelaide on Monday that she had confirmed the presence of DNA in tiny nanoscale structures believed to be the smallest autonomous living organisms on Earth, called 'nanobes'. |
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| RAFTING RODENTS FROM AFRICA MAY HAVE BEEN ANCESTORS OF SOUTH AMERICAN SPECIES |
| Forty million years ago, rodents from Africa may have colonized South America by rafting or swimming across the Atlantic, Texas A&M University biologists theorize by studying the evolution of rodents, looking at their genes instead of their fossils - an approach that promises to revolutionize the field of evolutionary biology. |
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| COMPLEX MOLECULE FOUND IN SPACE |
| The compound vinyl alcohol has been found in space, raising hopes of clues to the origin of complex organic molecules. The molecule was found in an interstellar cloud of dust and gas near the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy by radio astronomers using the National Science Foundation's 12 Meter Telescope at Kitt Peak, Arizona. |
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| NEW FOSSILS SUGGEST WHALES AND HIPPOS ARE CLOSE KIN |
| Partial skeletons of ancient whales found in Pakistan last year resolve a longstanding controversy over the origin of whales, confirming that the giant sea creatures evolved from early ancestors of sheep, deer and hippopotami and suggesting that hippos may be the closest living relatives of whales. The new finds, reported in the Sept. 21 issue of the journal Science, are the first and only specimens known that combine sheep-like ankle bones and archaic whale skull bones in the very same skeletons. |
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| COMETS AND METEORITES ARE THE FIRST GENETICS ON THE EARTH |
| Russian scientists have produced a new vision of the hypothesis put forward by researchers from the Berkley University and National Laboratory. According to it, meteorite bombardment could have played a key role in life evolution on the Earth. |
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