Natural History
BOZEMAN, Mont. -- A journey that started with a box of bird feet carried three Montana State University graduate students into the gruesome world of raptors and led to their findings being published in a prominent journal.
Durham, NC -- The most extensive DNA study to-date of Africa's rarest monkey reveals that the species had an intriguing sexual past.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- A team of researchers including a University of Florida paleontologist has used a rich cache of plant fossils discovered in Colombia to provide the first reliable evidence of how Neotropical rainforests looked 58 million years ago.
After 15 years of research in the waters of the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the American Museum of Natural History, and an international coalition of organizations have unveiled the largest genetic study of humpback whale populations ever conducted in the Southern Hemisphere.
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Known to science only by two specimens described in 1900, a critically endangered crow has re-emerged on a remote, mountainous Indonesian island thanks in part to a Michigan State University scientist.
New research published this week clips the wings of Archaeopteryx. First found in Germany in the 1860's and dating to 150 million years ago, Archaeopteryx has long been considered the iconic first bird.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- The raptor-like Archaeopteryx has long been viewed as the archetypal first bird, but new research reveals that it was actually a lot less "bird-like" than scientists had believed.
Some stars are lonely behemoths, with no surrounding planets or asteroids, while others sport a skirt of attendant planetary bodies. New research published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters explains why the composition of the stars often indicates whether their light shines into deep space, or whether a small fraction shines onto orbiting planets.
Now, just a few weeks after tiny, early Raptorex kriegsteini was unveiled, a new wrench has been thrown into the family tree of the tyrannosaurs. The new Alioramus altai -- a horned, long-snouted, gracile cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex -- shared the same environment with larger, predatory relatives.
Nearly 17 years after plucking the fossilized tooth of a new human ancestor from a pebbly desert in Ethiopia, an international team of scientists today (Thursday, Oct. 1) announced their reconstruction of a partial skeleton of the hominid, Ardipithecus ramidus, which they say revolutionizes our understanding of the earliest phase of human evolution.
Western Pennsylvania Conservancy (WPC) scientists have discovered a plant in Erie County that has never been recorded in Pennsylvania.
The plant, dwarf scouring rush, was identified with the aid of a Mercyhurst College professor on the college's Mercyhurst West property in Girard.
Dwarf scouring rush is known to exist in northern U.S.
When the ancestors of living cetaceans -- whales, dolphins and porpoises -- first dipped their toes into water, a series of evolutionary changes were sparked that ultimately nestled these swimming mammals into the larger hoofed animal group. But what happened first, a change from a plant-based diet to a carnivorous diet, or the loss of their ability to walk?
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- When it comes to understanding a critical junction in animal evolution, some short, simple flatworms have been a real thorn in scientists' sides. Specialists have jousted over the proper taxonomic placement of a group of worms called Acoelomorpha.
Researchers from several institutions including the University of Colorado at Boulder have sequenced DNA "barcodes" for as many as 25 hunted wildlife species, providing information that can be used to better monitor the elusive trade of wildlife products, or bushmeat.
Conservation geneticists who study sea turtles have a new tool to help track this highly migratory and endangered group of marine animals: DNA barcodes. DNA barcodes are short genetic sequences that efficiently distinguish species from each other -- even if the samples from which the DNA is extracted are minute or degraded.
