Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Fossil discoveries unlock chapters of our planet’s storied ...

Fossils unearthed in Morocco are the first from a little-understood period of human evolution and may be remains of a ...

"This book was originally published as an issue of Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society B; Biological sciences (volume 363; number 1496) but has been materially changed and updated"--Title ...

The discovery of new cynodont fossils from southern Brazil by a team of palaeontologists has led to a significant breakthrough in understanding the evolution of mammals. These fossils, belonging to ...

A new study led by a researcher from the School of Zoology and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History at Tel Aviv University examined dinosaur fossils preserved with their feathers and found that ...

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

The ancient coelacanth, which has existed for some 419 million years, never stopped evolving despite its reputation as a "living fossil." A new discovery reveals that it evolved faster when plate ...

Coelacanths, often termed “living fossils”, represent an extraordinary lineage of lobe‐finned fishes with a fossil record spanning from the Devonian to the present. Their evolutionary history is ...

Inside a specially constructed safe at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa sit the fragile remains of the world’s most celebrated human ancestor. She was once a hardy survivor in an ...

Despite differences in shape and size all insects are characterized by a body organization that includes three units: a head, thorax and abdomen (panels A-B). In contrast all spiders (and other ...

Navaornis hestiae (center) documents a previously unknown intermediate stage in the evolution of the central nervous system between the earliest birds (like Archaeopteryx on the left) and living birds ...

Human evolution is often told as a tidy story of adaptation, yet some of our most familiar body parts still defy straightforward explanation. From the jut of the human chin to the curve of the outer ...