Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit Earth and ended the age of the non-avian dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurs, horned dinosaurs, long-necked giants, duck-billed herbivores, and many smaller species disappeared. But one branch of dinosaurs survived: birds. That survival was not simple. It was not because birds were somehow outside the catastrophe.…
There is something almost mythic about sharks. They move through the imagination as ancient creatures – older than forests, older than dinosaurs, older than almost anything we instinctively think of as familiar. They feel like survivors from another world, as if they belong less to ordinary biology and more to…
By Costin Liculescu of InsightArea One of the most counterintuitive things about evolution is that species do not appear the way a switch flips on. There was no year in which Homo sapiens did not exist and then, fifty years later, suddenly did. That is not how evolution works. Species…