Juvenile orangutan pulling its mother’s hair. Source: BOS Foundation BPI, used with permission. Are humans the only animals with a mischievous sense of humor? Where did our ability to joke with one ...

Evolution is a continuous, powerful force shaping the natural world around us. As environmental pressures intensify, future animal evolution is likely to produce fascinating and sometimes bizarre new ...

The story of two of the strangest animals on the planet just got a little stranger, thanks to clues revealed by a lone fossil specimen that scientists now say represents a long-extinct ancestor. The ...

Evolution is often perceived as an incredibly slow, natural process driven by environmental pressures over millennia. That characterization certainly holds true, but humans have also repeatedly ...

A microorganism whose evolutionary roots can be traced to the era of the first multicellular animals may provide a glimpse of how single-celled organisms made a critical evolutionary leap. In ...

The evolution of some of the earliest complex animals on our planet may have been spurred on by other, simpler early animals. These simple marine animals first evolved around 560 million years ago and ...

Mark Twain, arguably one of the greatest American humorists, remarked that “humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.” Indeed, some have argued that the human capacity for humor is what distinguishes our ...

A series of whole genome and gene duplication events that go back hundreds of millions of years have laid the foundations for tissue-specific gene expression, according to a new study. The 'copy-paste ...

In five cases where vertebrates evolved monogamy, the same changes in gene expression occurred each time. In many non-monogamous species, females provide all or most of the offspring care. In ...

700 million years ago, a remarkable creature emerged for the first time. Though it may not have been much to look at by today’s standards, the animal had a front and a back, a top and a bottom. This ...