Natural History

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin believe they have pinpointed our most distant animal relative in the tree of life and, in doing so, have resolved an ongoing debate. Their work finds strong evidence that sponges - not more complex comb jellies - were our most distant relatives.

By clearing forests, burning grasslands, plowing fields and harvesting crops, humans apply strong selective pressures on the plants that survive on the landscapes we use.

A study of ancient bones shows that Early Neolithic sheep-breeders were faced with high levels of mortality among young animals in their herds.

Woolly mammoths may have walked the landscape at the same time as the earliest humans in what is now New England, according to a Dartmouth study published in Boreas.

The history of dogs has been intertwined, since ancient times, with that of the humans who domesticated them.

In Wonderland, Alice drank a potion to shrink herself. In nature, some animal species shrink to escape the attention of human hunters, a process that takes from decades to millennia.

Although amber looks like a somewhat unusual inorganic mineral, it is actually derived from an organic source - tree resins.

An international team led by researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm has sequenced DNA recovered from mammoth remains that are up to 1.2 million years old.

New research suggests that overhunting by humans was not responsible for the extinction of mammoths, ground sloths, and other North American megafauna.

Far underneath the ice shelves of the Antarctic, there's more life than expected, finds a recent study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

A new analysis of a horse previously believed to be from the Ice Age shows that the animal actually died just a few hundred years ago--and was raised, ridden and cared for by Native peoples.

In a cross-cultural analysis, Washington State University researchers found several factors may have played a role in building the mutually beneficial relationship between humans and dogs, including temperature, hunting and surprisingly - gender.