The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our ...

A team of biologists in Montana and Germany has found that, regardless of type, those insects that express a protective stick- or leaf-like appearance all evolved the same basic body parts. In their ...

One of the most consequential evolutionary truths of our species is the dramatic increase in the size of our brains. Our closest animal relative had no such brain boom. So what gives? And what does ...

From the first time two cells stuck together, evolution has been crafting new bodies—biological machines then put to the test ...

The water-to-land transition stands as one of the most significant events in vertebrate evolution, giving rise to the two major groups of living land vertebrates—amniotes and lissamphibians—which ...

The meat-eating dinosaurs known as theropods that roamed the ancient Earth ranged in size from the bus-sized T. rex to the smaller, dog-sized Velociraptor. Scientists puzzling over how such wildly ...

Body size stands as one of the most influential traits in the history of life, affecting physiology, ecology and evolutionary trajectories. In paleobiological systems, the study of size evolution ...

What are humans adapted for? -- Upstanding apes: how we became bipeds -- Much depends on dinner: how australopiths partly weaned us off fruit -- The first hunter-gatherers: how nearly modern bodies ...