During these waves of mass extinction, most vertebrate survivors were confined to refugia, or isolated biodiversity hotspots ...

Environmental change doesn’t affect evolution in a single, predictable way. In large-scale computer simulations, scientists discovered that some fluctuating conditions help populations evolve higher ...

As early humans spread from lush African forests into grasslands, their need for ready sources of energy led them to develop a taste for grassy plants, especially grains and the starchy plant tissue ...

One hundred years ago a young teacher, John T. Scopes, went on trial in Dayton, Tenn., for violating a recently enacted state law that forbade the state’s educators “to teach any theory that denies ...

A fish thought to be evolution’s time capsule just surprised scientists. A detailed dissection of the coelacanth — a 400-million-year-old species often called a “living fossil” — revealed that key ...

At the end of 1924, an anthropologist began chipping away rock around an old primate skull — and rewrote the story of human evolution. The diminutive skull — about the size of a coffee mug — clearly ...

One hundred years ago, a small town in eastern Tennessee captured the attention of the entire country. A biology teacher in Dayton was accused of teaching human evolution to his students — which was ...

Less than 70 years after Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, became the center of the American debate about human evolution, the interpretation of ...