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Amphibians, Reptiles, & Natural History
Amphibians, Reptiles, & Natural History
The seemingly trivial ability to hear a regular pulse in music is a remarkable—and perhaps distinctively human—feature of the brain. In a wide-ranging critical review, Gábor Háden of the HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences and Henkjan Honing of the University of Amsterdam evaluate more than two decades of research into how this capacity develops and has evolved. Their paper was published this week in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
It turns out that one of the smallest dog breeds, the Chihuahua, is part wild coyote, according to recently published genetic research. The Chihuahua breed originated in Mexico but is now a popular canine companion worldwide.
An international team of researchers, including those at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Institute of Science Tokyo, has developed a protein language model that brings together two fundamental sources of information about proteins: their amino acid sequences and three-dimensional structures.
About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period, a large proportion of species on Earth rapidly became extinct. After this mass extinction, many groups of organisms began to recover, while reptiles known as archosauromorphs—the group that includes dinosaurs and crocodiles—proliferated.
Allowing females to mate with multiple males, rather than just one, could help make species more resistant to extinction, University of East Anglia research shows. A new study reveals that when females have multiple males to mate with, their offspring inherit significantly fewer harmful genetic mutations. This, in turn, makes the entire population healthier and less likely to die out.
Tiny flowers trapped in amber around 15 million years ago are offering scientists a rare glimpse into the plant life of a tropical rainforest in what is now Southeast China. Researchers have studied two exceptionally well-preserved fossil flowers from the Zhangpu flora.
About 66 million years ago, a dinosaur—maybe a T. rex or a Nanotyrannus—ate a bird. The record of that meal, in the form of fossilized poop, has survived to today, preserving the best example of a feather ever found from the age of dinosaurs. By studying this feather, scientists reported in a new study in the journal Current Biology, researchers have found clues that help explain why birds are the only group of dinosaurs that survived the mass extinction 66 million years ago.
A "peculiar" new species of Jurassic squid-like animal has been unearthed in Wyoming, U.S., following the discovery of two exceptionally rare fossils dating to around 160 million years ago.
Taylor Swift is now the namesake of a genus of plant-feeding insects from Australia that were previously unknown to science.
Ichthyosaurs ruled the oceans for 150 million years during the Mesozoic Era. Their fish-shaped bodies were built for high speeds. In that context, it is normally an advantage to be as light as possible.
A new comparative review, published in The Anatomical Record, examines factors that may lead to birth complications among humans and other mammals. The study suggests that fetal sex may play an important role in risky births in humans and several other species.
More than two decades after scientists first sequenced the entire human genome—all 3 billion base pairs, of DNA code—the meaning of much of this code remains a mystery.