Shortly after an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, life for non-avian dinosaurs ended, but the evolutionary story for the early ancestors of birds began. The fossil record tells us ...

Robots evolve more quickly and efficiently after a virtual mass extinction modeled after real-life disasters such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs. At the start of the simulation, a biped ...

The false claim says: “A random process like evolution could not produce the kind of complexity and beauty that we see in nature.” Bring up the theory of evolution in a group of people and there is a ...

Every so often, life on Earth steps onto a nearly empty playing field and faces a spectacular opportunity. Something major changes—in the atmosphere or in the oceans, or in the organisms themselves ...

The questions Prof. David Jablonski asks aren’t the little ones. “How do you go from a monkey hanging out in a tree, to an organism who can build electric guitars, and air conditioners, and trains, ...

Unfortunately, this book can't be printed from the OpenBook. If you need to print pages from this book, we recommend downloading it as a PDF. Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this ...

pt. 1. Beyond the mainland ; 1. Introduction ; 2. History of island studies ; 3. Factors that influence island faunas. Types of islands. Dispersals to islands. The candidate species. Composition of ...

Did a collision with a giant asteroid or comet change the shape of life on Earth forever? It is widely agreed that such an object -- 10 kilometers across -- struck just off the coast of the Yucatan ...

A new study examined how bivalves -- the group that includes clams, mussels, scallops, and oysters -- evolved among many others in the period of rapid evolution known as the Cambrian Explosion. The ...

Life changes over time. Of course, it does. We know this thanks to a wealth of converging evidence in the form of millions of fossils, clear genetic clues, and observations made out in the field and ...