Evolution

A fossil from West Texas that had been taken for a crustacean is described in Nature as an early insect with paddle-tipped legs running down its abdomen. The paper, "Amphibious stem-insect sheds…

Giant viruses are actively infecting fungi, a kingdom of life in which the paper says they had not previously been definitively found, according to a study published Aug. 25 in the open-access…

In a humid forest of conifers and ferns, in what is now Inner Mongolia, the loudest thing in the undergrowth may have been an animal no human ear could have picked up. Its song was made by scraping…

A museum drawer of songbird skeletons does not look like a story. It looks like a lot of small, pale, similar bones. Sparrows, finches, warblers, thrushes: the group biologists call Passeriformes…

A study published Aug. 19 in Science Advances places more than 5,800 animal genomes on a single map and reports that chromosomes rearrange along a limited set of routes that cannot be retraced,…

Grasses carry two separate chemical routes for making starch, and their closest non-grass relatives carry only one, according to a University of Wisconsin–Madison release describing a paper published…

In the Botanical Garden of the University of Potsdam grows a South African plant called Wachendorfia thyrsiflora, the butterfly lily. Look into one of its yellow flowers and you find a small…

Step into a rainforest and the soundscape can feel infinite, thousands of species layering whistles, buzzes, and rippling phrases into a wall of noise. That impression of endless variety is, in a…

Pick any two eukaryotes far enough apart and the differences are almost comic. A human being and Acanthamoeba castellanii, a soil amoeba that spends its life eating bacteria in damp earth, last…