A new landmark study has uncovered evidence that challenges the long-held beliefs about human evolution.

What makes this research appealing is that it is based on studies of more than a dozen field and laboratory task forces assigned to complete a specific project. This research reveals that each group ...

The punctuated mode of evolution posits that evolution occurs in rare bursts of rapid evolutionary change followed by long periods of genetic stability (stasis). The accepted cause for the rapid ...

One of the most enduring tropes about crocodiles is to describe them as “living fossils”. They are cold, slow moving and scaly, so they look like how one might picture a dinosaur. Like many clichés, ...

The gradual character of evolution is a key feature of the Darwinian worldview. However, macroevolutionary events are often thought to occur in a nongradualist manner, in a regime known as punctuated ...

In certain places around the world – in the Badlands near Drumheller in Alberta, Canada, in the Geulhemmergroeve tunnels in the Netherlands, or in the Hell Creek formation in eastern Montana – you can ...

Change, a 1985 paper argued, can be characterised as a “punctuated equilibrium”: long periods of relative calm and small incremental alterations that are interrupted by brief, but radical, seismic ...

The archaeological record suggests that cultural traits, as manifested in the tool repertoire, can accumulate exponentially, that technology can appear in bursts after long periods of stasis, and that ...

One of the most bizarre mammals in the world now has a sister species. The newly discovered Thor's hero shrew shares the unusually sturdy, interlocking vertebrae of the known hero shrew, and it could ...

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of kilometres away from any significantly-sized landmass, lies the Hawaiian archipelago. Despite its remote location and geological youth, this chain of ...