Evolution

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have sequenced nuclear paleogenomes from two fossils of Miracinonyx trumani (the extinct animal long called the American cheetah) and found it…

Chimpanzees at two African sites can be told apart by the sound of their laughs, grunts and whimpers, and the difference is sharper in juveniles than in infants, researchers report in PLOS One.…

A team led from University College Dublin has sequenced 21 ancient genomes of sheeppox virus, a disease of sheep, several of them recovered from medieval parchment, the animal skin that manuscripts…

A ribosome spends most of its working life waiting. The machine that builds every protein in every living cell cannot start until a messenger RNA happens to drift into it and thread through the right…

Ninety percent of the Arthrobacter bacterial strains found in Antarctic soils occur nowhere else on Earth, according to a study published on August 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of…

The skull of the thylacine, the marsupial predator hunted to extinction in Tasmania in 1936, combines features found in no living meat-eating mammal, according to a study published Aug. 31 in Nature…

A frog collected on the Marojejy massif in northeastern Madagascar has sat in a jar in Paris for half a century, and for most of that time it was a problem. It is the holotype of Rhombophryne…

Tuberculosis bacteria take DNA damage as they dry out inside the airborne droplets that carry them from one person to the next, and that damage switches on a repair system that helps…

Researchers have assembled near-complete genomes for eight closely related species of Myotis bats and report that the group adapts to DNA viruses and to RNA viruses in two different ways, in a paper…

Erik Tihelka was leafing through a secondhand Russian paleontology textbook when a line drawing stopped him: a small, many-legged animal from a shale bed in West Texas, labeled a crustacean. He…

The chimneys at Lost City are the wrong color. Where the black smokers strung along the mid-ocean ridges build dark spires out of metal sulfide, this field on a bald dome of mantle rock in the…

A mouse dies in the leaf litter of a northern European wood, and within a few hours a pair of burying beetles has found it. They work through the night. The two of them drag the body down into the…