In times of environmental upheaval, how do communities of organisms respond? When entire species are wiped out, do surviving species move in and take over, or do new species immigrate to fill the gaps ...

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 ...

Shortly after an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, life for non-avian dinosaurs ended, but the evolutionary story for the early ancestors of birds began. The fossil record tells us ...

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 ...

Recent research showed that an artificially constructed RNA self-replicating system modeling primitive life at the origin of life evolved to become more prone to extinction under certain experimental ...

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 ...

The transition across the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary, approximately 66 million years ago, marks one of the most profound mass extinctions in Earth’s history, characterised by the demise of ...

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 ...