Evolution Diary

An undergraduate student digging through a collection of fossils in a Pennsylvania museum recently found beautifully preserved full-body impressions of foot-long (30-centimeter-long) salamander-like creatures that lived 330 million years ago. (…)

A clam dredged up off the coast of Iceland is thought to have been the longest-lived animal discovered. (…)

Giant hyenas, sabretoothed cats, giraffes and zebras lived side by side in Europe 1.8 million years ago. (…)

By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, Murcia, Spain
Some Neanderthals were probably redheads, a DNA study has shown. (…)

Neanderthals, an archaic human species that dominated Europe until the arrival of modern humans some 45,000 years ago, possessed a critical gene known to underlie speech, according to DNA evidence retrieved from two individuals excavated from El Sidron, a cave in northern Spain. (…)