Evolution

There are two ways for a fish to end up among the smallest vertebrates on Earth. One is to shrink in proportion. The result is a tiny animal otherwise built like its larger relatives, with everything…

Researchers in China have described a Late Jurassic fossil that sits near the base of the bird family tree and, they report, could not fly. The animal, named Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis, comes from the…

Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Copenhagen have found a bacterial immune system that fights off viruses by building long stretches of repeated DNA, the same job telomerase…

Ask an engineer for a network that computes well, survives the loss of its parts and stays cheap, and the answer is that you will have to choose. The three demands fight one another. Extra…

Iron-starved Arabidopsis plants change which chemicals they release into the soil according to how acidic their surroundings are, and the bacteria living on their roots then use those chemicals to…

Botanists have described a new species of giant waterlily from the upper Orinoco basin in eastern Colombia. The description was published Oct. 7, 2026, in the journal Phytotaxa, under the name…

A fossil from the Middle Jurassic of China has been described with its throat intact: the bony roof of the passage and the small bones that sit inside it, parts that almost never survive in an animal…

Stanford University researchers report that the Tsimane of Bolivia and the Hadza of Tanzania, two Indigenous peoples living on different continents, share 1,231 species of gut bacteria. Genetic…

The animal is 322 millimeters long, dried to a yellow-beige, and it has sat in a cabinet in southern Germany since the late 1980s. For most of that time it carried a name: Bathynomus giganteus, the…

Bone fragments too small to identify by shape, from Denisova Cave and other sites in southern Siberia, carried the DNA of an extinct relative of cattle and yaks that has never been described. These…

Diatoms grown for more than 1,000 generations in acidified seawater grew faster and fixed more carbon than lines kept at today's carbon dioxide level, but carried less phosphorus in their cells where…

In 2010, in a lab at the University of Texas at Arlington, a postdoctoral researcher named Cheng Sun was combing viral genomes for stretches of human DNA, and found some. Two copies of a human gene…