“Unnatural” Selection
Humans driveevolutionof conch size
March 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.
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.
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.
Long-distance migrations are common for large whales, but when in their evolutionary past did they begin to migrate and why? Fossil whale barnacles may have the answers
By taking on characteristics from another, younger stage in its life-cycle, this fossil crab was probably able to adapt to new conditions.
By diving into the past lives of coral reefs, a historical ecologist may protect our present-day reefs from human impacts
The Panamanian scientist Carlos De Gracia discovered the largest known marlin fossil, helped improve the classification of these ancient species and now seeks to understand how the fish of millions of years ago reacted to changes in the ocean similar to those we are experiencing today