Apes vs snakes: Who would win?
How did ancient primates evolve resistance to cobra venom? We ask an expert.
Who's afraid of cobras? Not gorillas and chimps! Recent research has shown that an ancient ancestor of chimps, gor...
Evolution
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Video
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Did life arise on hydrogen energy?
New theory on the origins of life is a gas.
It’s one of life’s most profound and puzzling mysteries: how on earth did life get started from simple, inanimate mat...
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Ancient hominin walked like a human but climbed like an ape
New fossil vertebrae of Australopithecus sediba reveals how early hominins moved.
Early hominins used their upper limbs to climb like apes and their lower limbs to walk like humans, according to new ...
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Monarch butterflies’ predators copy their poison resistance at a genetic level
Convergent evolution sees wildly different species avoid milkweed toxins.
Monarch caterpillars live on poisonous milkweed, which makes the adult monarch butterflies noxious to most predators....
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Conversation
Antarctic bacteria live on air and use hydrogen as fuel
Scientists have found that hundreds of bacterial species in the frozen soils in East Antarctica u...
By Pok Man Leung, Monash University; Chris Greening, Monash University, and Steven Chown, Monash University Humans...
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What caused the Earth’s first mass extinction?
New modelling explores whether oxygen triggered the demise of 85% of marine species.
Nearly 500 million years ago in the late Ordovician period, a mass extinction wiped out 85% of marine species. Scient...
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Using AI to probe the dawn of animal life
Study of ancient Australian fossils receives funding from NASA.
A joint Australian-US team has a plan to use AI to understand the oldest complex fossils on Earth – and they’ve just ...
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Snakes dined out after dinosaurs died out
The emergence of a diverse diet propelled snake evolution.
Around 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs died out. But it wasn’t a sad day for everyone, with mammal and bird evolu...
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Let there be photosynthesis: three billion years of fresh air
Cyanobacteria evolved photosynthesis before the Great Oxygenation Event
Long ago, the Earth was filled with unbreathable gases that prohibited the existence of life as we know. But a moment...
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Video
Searching for the dawn of animal life
The new national park preserving Earth’s earliest life.
Drone footage courtesy of Associate Prof Diego C. García-Bellido (South Australian Museum/University of Adelaide). ...
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Huge new fossil species uncovered in Canada
Half-billion-year-old critter belonged to an extinct group of animals.
Palaeontologists have dug up a brand new animal species from the Cambrian era, more than 500 million years ago. Remar...
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The origins of snakes and lizards, speedy asteroids, tree-ring tsunamis and more – here’s what we...
Reptile fossil provides clues to origin of snakes and lizards While palaeontologists know quite a lot about the ea...