Recently, a three-toed skink (Saiphos equalis) pulled off an extraordinary feat: It laid three eggs and delivered another baby through live birth in the same pregnancy. That suggests that the lizard species is in a rare transitional form between egg-laying and live-bearing animals, according to a study published in Molecular Ecology last month.
Scientists say we’re all eukaryotes: Plants, animals, fungi, and tiny multicelled organisms called protists are the four kingdoms of life, which encompass everything living that we’ve found on Earth.
But a new discovery from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, published in Nature, claims to have discovered a fifth kingdom of life—a new kind of eukaryote. The paper describes two organisms, one newly unearthed in Nova Scotia and one discovered in 1988, which upon DNA analysis are more distinct from anything else than previously thought.
A new large-data study of fossil and extant bivalves and gastropods in the Atlantic Ocean suggests laziness might be a fruitful strategy for survival of individuals, species and even communities of species. The results have just been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B by a research team based at the University of Kansas.
“This work illustrates that members of complex communities can evolve together, laying the groundwork for future research on how these organisms evolve in response to reliable partnerships.”
An extraordinary new species of arachnid, resembling a spider with a tail, has been discovered in amber from Myanmar (formerly Burma), of mid-Cretaceous age, around 100 million years ago.
Human evolution can seem like a phenomenon of the distant past which applies only to our ancestors living millions of years ago. But human evolution is ongoing. To evolve simply means that mutations – the accidental changes to genes that happen normally in the process of copying DNA – are becoming more or less common in the population over time.
“It is clear that life has had a profound role in creating the world we are used to, and the planet has similarly affected the trajectory of life. I think it’s important people acknowledge the miracle of their own existence and recognise what an amazing planet this is.”
My Trip To The Amazon 
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