Robots evolve more quickly and efficiently after a virtual mass extinction modeled after real-life disasters such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs. At the start of the simulation, a biped ...

The questions Prof. David Jablonski asks aren’t the little ones. “How do you go from a monkey hanging out in a tree, to an organism who can build electric guitars, and air conditioners, and trains, ...

Life changes over time. Of course, it does. We know this thanks to a wealth of converging evidence in the form of millions of fossils, clear genetic clues, and observations made out in the field and ...

When the Kinks' Ray Davies penned the tune 'Last of the Steam-Powered Trains,' the vanishing locomotives stood as nostalgic symbols of a simpler English life. But for a paleontologist, the replacement ...

The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) mass extinction event, marking the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods approximately 66 million years ago, stands as one of the most profound ...

A pair of Sacabambaspis fish, around 35 cm in length, which had distinct, forward-facing eyes and an armored head. No fossils of animals like Sacabambaspis from after the Late Ordovician Mass ...

This graph plots extinction rates of marine animal families over the last 600 million years. The shaded band indicates the normal range of extinction rates, known as "background extinction." The five ...

Unfortunately, this book can't be printed from the OpenBook. If you need to print pages from this book, we recommend downloading it as a PDF. Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this ...

Did a collision with a giant asteroid or comet change the shape of life on Earth forever? It is widely agreed that such an object -- 10 kilometers across -- struck just off the coast of the Yucatan ...

Press releases are posted on Independent.com as a free community service. Environmental historian and author Daniel Lewis will deliver a free illustrated lecture based on his book Belonging on an ...