How Did Birds Get Their Wings? Bacteria May Provide a Clue, Say ScientistsNew research has used bacteria to show that acquiring duplicate copies of genes can provide a 'template' allowing organisms to evolve novel traits from redundant copies of existing genes.University of Oxford...
Neither birds nor bats, pterosaurs were reptiles, close cousins of dinosaurs who evolved on a separate branch of the reptile family tree. They were also the first animals afterinsects to evolve powered flight—not just leaping or gliding, but flapping their wings to generate lift and travel thr...
Many of these feathered dinosaurs could not fly, prompting a new mystery: If not to take flight, why did they evolve to have feathers in the first place? This movie illustrates three different ways in which dinosaurs with proto-wings might have flushed their prey by visual displays to subsequ...
Walking independently evolved several times in fish, making it an example of evolutionary convergence (similar traits that evolve independently,like wings in bats and birds). The evolution of walking in fish is rare though. There are more than 30,000 species of fish as we know them today (not...
Wing-Assisted Incline Running (WAIR): Modern birds, such as young partridges, use their wings to help them run up steep inclines. This behavior supports the idea that feathered dinosaurs might have used their proto-wings in a similar way, gradually developing the ability to glide and eventually...
How did the largest of all dinosaurs evolve necks longer than any other creature that has ever lived? One secret: mostly hollow neck bones, researchers say. The largest creatures to ever walk the Earth were the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as the sauropods. These vegetarians had ...
Saving birds with broken wings Fixing toys with broken parts Cheering for the underdog Coaching those who don’t yet believe in themselves Coaxing sunshine from clouds Just as my negative self-talk was reaching a fervent pitch in my head, the phone rang. ...
Communities see different signs to forecast rain such as frogs croaking and a large number of low-flying dragonflies in Backan, Vietnam (Manh and Ahmad2021); the gathering of dark clouds and ducks running around flapping their wings and bathing in the sand in KilifiCounty, Kenya, (Mwaniki ...
Vonesh takes his tub of tadpoles to the shed where Warkentin photographs it. A student will count the tadpoles in each picture. Insects and birds sing from the trees. Something falls—plink—on the metal roof. A freight train whistles from the train tracks that run alongside the canal; a...
The formation of UV patterns is based on small structures in the scales on butterflies’ wings. Although these structures are on a microscopic scale, they could be closely related to large-scale phenomena, such as the distribution of populations with different levels of UV reflectance. For this ...