News
Afar fossil shows broad distribution and versatility of Paranthropus
10+ hour, 7+ min ago (1767+ words) Nature (2026)Cite this article Villase'or, A., Bobe, R. & Behrensmeyer, A. K. Middle Pliocene hominin distribution patterns in Eastern Africa. J. Hum. Evol. 147, 102856 (2020). Wood, B. & Strait, D. Patterns of resource use in early Homo and Paranthropus. J. Hum. Evolution 46, 119162 (2004). Wood, B. & Boyle, E. K. Hominin taxic diversity: fact or fantasy? Am. J. Phys....
A variety of early hominin species shared the Afar region of Ethiopia
10+ hour, 7+ min ago (424+ words) Carol V. Ward is in the Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences and in the Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65212, USA. There is immense interest in understanding the history and evolution of our species and that of our…...
An eye-popping discovery: early vertebrates had four eyes rather than two
10+ hour, 7+ min ago (349+ words) Michael S. Levine is at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA. There is considerable interest in understanding how vision and image-forming eyes evolved, and scientists tend to take it for granted that most vertebrates have…...
Four camera-type eyes in the earliest vertebrates from the Cambrian Period
22+ hour, 4+ min ago (1241+ words) Nature (2026)Cite this article Eakin, R. M. The Third Eye (Univ. of California Press,1973). Darwin, C. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life 1st edn (Murray, 1859). Benoit, J., Abdala, F., Manger, P. R. & Rubidge,…...
Wolf pup’s stomach yields DNA from one of world’s last surviving woolly rhinos
1+ week, 22+ hour ago (535+ words) Rachel Fieldhouse is a reporter for Nature in Sydney, Australia. Roughly 14,400 years ago in what is now Russia, a wolf pup feasted on the meat of a woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) that probably belonged to one of the last populations…...
How did birds evolve? The answer is wilder than anyone thought
1+ week, 1+ day ago (1077+ words) Michael Marshall is a science journalist in Devon, UK. Ultraviolet light helps to reveal soft tissue preserved along with the bones of an Archaeopteryx fossil at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois. Credit: Delaney Drummond/Field Museum Some 150 million years…...
doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09897-w
2+ week, 22+ hour ago (1677+ words) Nature (2026)Cite this article Csiki-Sava, Z., Buffetaut, E., "si, A., Pereda-Suberbiola, X. & Brusatte, S. L. Island life in the Cretaceous " faunal composition, biogeography, evolution, and extinction of land-living vertebrates on the Late Cretaceous European archipelago. Zookeys 469, 1161 (2015). Weishampel, D. B., Jianu, C.-M., Csiki, Z. & Norman, D. B. Osteology and phylogeny of Zalmoxes (n. g.), an…...
The visual system of the longest-living vertebrate, the Greenland shark
2+ week, 2+ day ago (1751+ words) The bovine eyes used in this study (n=5) were obtained from a commercial slaughterhouse. Each eye was dissected to remove the anterior segment, lens, and vitreous. The retina was then carefully separated from the underlying eyecup and stored at "80C until…...
Palaeometabolomes yield biological and ecological profiles at early human sites
1+ mon, 4+ day ago (1656+ words) We chose to particularly represent the Olduvai Gorge fossiliferous locality for two reasons: (1) the original semi-arid environmental reconstruction has recently been re-examined to include dense woodland and wetland3, to which we predicted exogenous metabolites of the palaeometabolomes might correspond; and (2) fossil…...
Neanderthals mastered fire — 400,000 years ago
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (252+ words) Anne Marie Conlon is Nature's chief digital editor. Download the Nature Podcast 10 December 2025 Research Article: Davis et al. News and Views: Oldest known evidence of the controlled ignition of fire Machine-learning algorithms can help to identify traces of life in…...