Planetary systems such as our solar system take hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Since humanity has only existed for a sliver of that time, astronomers have only observed planetary systems at ...

Astronomers have witnessed one of our universe's biggest stars transforming into a rare stellar body, and the dramatic metamorphosis may be the prequel to a powerful supernova explosion that sees this ...

A layer of rock just 520 million years old sat directly on top of ancient rock dating back 1.4 to 1.8 billion years.

When the supercontinent Pangea began to fragment around 200 million years ago during the Early Jurassic, it reshaped the face of the planet. Vast new oceans opened, continents drifted apart and the ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from new developments in ape cognition to an expanded perspective of a ...

Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to unravel in 2025. Analysis of DNA extracted from the fossil electrified the ...

One of the most important steps in the evolution of modern mammals was the development of highly sensitive hearing. The middle ear of mammals, with an eardrum and several small bones, allows us to ...

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. If I tried to recap all the new fossils, new methods and ...

Jacob S. Suissa receives funding from The National Science Foundation. He is affiliated with Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, and Let's Botanize Inc. There are few forms of the botanical world ...

Modern dog breeds come in a mind-boggling array of shapes and sizes—from Chihuahua to Great Dane, corgi to greyhound, pug to German shepherd. In fact, the domestic dog, Canis familiaris, shows more ...