“Unnatural” Selection
Humans driveevolutionof conch size
Marzo 21, 2014
Thousands of years of hunting has turned a substantial meal into a bite-sized snack.
Thousands of years of hunting has turned a substantial meal into a bite-sized snack.
20-million-year-old fossil seeds shed light on origins of plant biodiversity in Panama.
Fossil reefs from around the Caribbean show how biologically rich these ecosystems once were — and provide goalposts for conservationists hoping to restore them.
At one of the oldest Maya sites, STRI staff archaeologist, Ashley Sharpe, discovered dog bones from the Guatemalan highlands deep within two pyramids.
It is much faster to learn to recognize a new prey item from a neighboring species, than to learn by trial and error.
What slows or stops a disease epidemic if the pathogen is still present? It appears that wild frogs are becoming increasingly resistant to the chytrid fungal disease that has decimated amphibian populations around the world.
About 66 million years ago, a radical change on the Earth filled tropical forests with flowers. A new catalog of fossil pollen grains may hold an explanation.
Smithsonian scientists who documented massive mortality of corals and reef organisms meticulously studied one of the apparent causes: oxygen deficiency. A Smithsonian paleobiologist asks if the recent fossil record shows signs of similar hypoxia events.
White-faced capuchin monkeys in Panama’s Coiba National Park habitually use hammer and anvil stones to break hermit crab shells, snail shells, coconuts and other food items, according to visiting scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). This is the first report of habitual stone-tool use by Cebus monkeys.
Perhaps old species, like some older people, gradually lose their ability to deal with changes in their environment. Aaron O’Dea and colleagues show that when the Caribbean was cut off from the Pacific by the rise of the Panama land bridge, evolutionarily old species took longer to expand into new habitats than evolutionarily younger species did.