For three years, anthropologist Alan Rogers has attempted to solve an evolutionary puzzle. His research untangles millions of years of human evolution by analyzing DNA strands from ancient human species known as hominins. Like many evolutionary geneticists, Rogers compares hominin genomes looking for genetic patterns such as mutations and shared genes. He develops statistical methods […]

The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, wages war in our bodies using a strategy evolved over millions of years that turns our own cellular machines against themselves. Despite massive strides in understanding the disease, there are still important gaps. For years, scientists at the University of Utah wished there was a way to visualize how […]

Take a deep breath in. Slowly let it out. You have just participated in one of the most profound evolutionary revolutions on Earth—breathing air on land. It’s unclear how the first vertebrates thrived after crawling out of the sea nearly 400 million years ago, but the lungs hold an important clue. Birds, reptiles, mammals and […]

Access more multimedia files here. A few years ago, Scott Villa of Emory University had a problem. Then a graduate student at the University of Utah, he was stumped with an issue never addressed in school: How does one film lice having sex? Villa and University of Utah biologists had demonstrated real-time adaptation in their […]

When naturalist Charles Darwin stepped onto the Galapagos Islands in 1835, he encountered a bird that sparked a revolutionary theory on how new species originate. From island to island, finches had wildly varied beak designs that reflected their varied diets. The so-called Darwin’s finches are an emblem of adaptive radiation, which describes when organisms from […]

Why do people go to war when the consequences of warfare are so dramatic? Scholars have suggested that the motivations for participating in war either lie in the individual rewards warriors receive (to the victor goes the spoils) or because group members coerce them to participate for fear of punishment. Understanding the factors that motivate […]

Gone are the days of heavy science textbooks with over-used examples and hard-to-grasp lessons. The Genetic Science Learning Center (GSLC) at the University of Utah is bringing science education into the 21st century with an online, interactive and multimedia curriculum that teaches up-to-date concepts in evolution and genetics to high school students. The newly released and […]

Fossils of a new genus and species of an ankylosaurid dinosaur—Akainacephalus johnsoni—have been unearthed in the Kaiparowits Formation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), and are revealing new details about the diversity and evolution of this group of armored dinosaurs.  Expected to look like other North American Late Cretaceous ankylosaurid dinosaurs with smooth bony armor […]

An international collaboration, including the Natural History Museum of Utah at the University of Utah, has discovered that early humans in eastern Africa had—by about 320,000 years ago—begun trading with distant groups, using color pigments and manufacturing more sophisticated tools than those of the Early Stone Age. These newly discovered activities approximately date to the […]

In nature, plants engage in a never-ending battle to avoid being eaten. Unable to run away, plant species have evolved defenses to deter herbivores; they have spines, produce nasty chemicals, or grow tough leaves that are difficult to chew. For years, scientists have assumed that herbivores and plants are locked into evolutionary competition in which […]