Animal Life news stories

Ancient DNA, including that of wolves preserved in permafrost for tens of thousands of years, is shedding some light on how wild wolves became some of our best non-human friends.

A new wave of scientists argues that mainstream evolutionary theory needs an urgent overhaul. Their opponents have dismissed them as misguided careerists – and the conflict may determine the future of biology.

Using light-capturing proteins in living microbes, scientists have reconstructed what life was like for some of Earth’s earliest organisms. These efforts could help us recognize signs of life on other planets, whose atmospheres may more closely resemble our pre-oxygen planet.

We know that the Earth has had at least five major ice ages. The first one happened about 2 billion years ago and lasted about 300 million years. The most recent one started about 2.6 million years ago, and in fact, we are still technically in it.

A new study has identified an important molecular analogy that could explain the remarkable intelligence of these invertebrates

It was a young miner, digging through the northern Canadian permafrost in the seemingly aptly named Eureka Creek, who sounded the alarm when his front-end loader struck something unexpected in the Klondike gold fields

Fed by waters that pass through 600 meters (1,970 ft) of permafrost, the sub-zero, salty, virtually oxygen-free Lost Hammer Spring in the Canadian Arctic is one of the harshest places on Earth. Even here, however, life finds a way.

The Sun shone 20% less brightly on early Earth, and yet fossil evidence shows that our planet had warm shallow seas where stromatolites – microbial mats – thrived.

What Alida Bailleul saw through the microscope made no sense. She was examining thin sections of fossilised skull from a young hadrosaur, a duck-billed, plant-eating beast that roamed what is now Montana 75m years ago, when she spotted features that made her draw a breath.

A forest is home to billions of living things, some of them too small to be seen by the naked eye. Collectively, these micro-scale species contribute more to our planet than most of us could imagine.

All brown bears today have some polar bear ancestry due to genetic mixing more than 100,000 years ago.

Embryonic and fossil evidence proves that the human middle ear evolved from the spiracle of fishes. However, the origin of the vertebrate spiracle has long been an unsolved mystery in vertebrate evolution.

Mammoth teeth dating from 200,000 years ago are to be tested in the hope DNA samples can be found to reveal more about the creatures.

Close human contact only started about 3,500 years ago and birds were initially venerated, find archaeologists.

A new study reveals that humans arriving in what is now Australia likely ate it to extinction by stealing its eggs.