evolution (Page 9)

Researchers now think that evolution has more do to with “flower power” than with an asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs, giving us mammals a chance to take over.

In the Independent, Steve Connor reports that a student of the 4,500 species of mammal that are alive today has found that the period when mammals began to thrive and displace dinosaurs happened at the same time as the arrival of flowering plants, between 56 and 34 million years ago, which was 10 to 15 million years AFTER the dinosaurs were gone. Did we mammals love to smell the flowers?or eat the fruit they brought?
read more

Formerly wild animals are being crowded out of their natural habitats and are moving into suburbs and even into big cities?and they’re evolving new ways to cope. Humans are still evolving as well?we’re getting SMARTER. And scientists have discovered that evolution takes place more quickly at the equator.

In the April 22 issue of New Scientist magazine, Bob Holmes quotes ecologist Joel Brown as saying, “It’s the wild west of evolution and ecology.” He?s talking about the way evolution is working in big cities, as animals struggle to adapt to their new environments in order to survive.
read more

A fossil of a fish with “legs,” that anthropologists think represents the missing link in the evolution of sea creatures into land animals, has recently been discovered in Ethiopia. At the same time, biologists have learned that one type of fish?the catfish?STILL “walks” ashore to look for food.

Discovering that a catfish that lives in Africa regularly goes onto land to hunt for prey helps scientists imagine how those early fish, now seen only in fossils, gradually made the trip to dry land and eventually decided to stay there.
read more

Evolution isn?t just something that went on in the past, it’s still happening today. And some scientists think that evoltion plays out pretty much the same everywhere, meaning that alien life, when we find it, won’t be so different from us.

A group of geneticists at the University of Chicago have scanned the entire human genome in search of genetic variations that may signal recent evolution, and found more than 700 genetic variants occurred during the past 10,000 years of human evolution. To their way of thinking, that’s recent.
read more