All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called "last universal common ...

Genetic research does not always produce tidy answers. Sometimes it reveals traces that raise more questions than they settle ...

Artificial intelligence allows tracing the evolution of genetic control elements in the developing mammalian cerebellum. An ...

Humans' exposure to high temperature burn injuries may have played an important role in our evolutionary development, shaping ...

Graham Coop, a professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his work on human genetics and evolution. Katrina Huynh UC Davis A professor ...

An ancient ancestor of spiders and relatives doubled its genome about 400 million years ago, setting the stage for the ...

Unlike the nuclear genome, the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) is small, circular, and maternally inherited. This simplifies lineage tracing and can guide inferences of evolutionary relationships as part ...

Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe. Using advanced analysis based ...

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution generated scientific debate and discussion not only in Darwin's own time, but for decades afterward. In the latter part of the nineteenth century and the until the ...

In five cases where vertebrates evolved monogamy, the same changes in gene expression occurred each time. In many non-monogamous species, females provide all or most of the offspring care. In ...

When a cell divides, the genome has to be duplicated, then the two copies separate, with one going to each daughter cell. But there have been whole genome duplication events in organisms in which both ...