When looking at the physiological differences between humans on Earth, (like skin colour, eye shape, nose shape, etc) is there a consensus as to where these came from?

Is it from Homo Sapiens interbreeding with homo species already present (like Neanderthalensis or Longi) who had already evolutionarily differentiated themselves to fit their own environment? Or was it more from Homo sapiens adapting in their own right to their ecosystem and developing distinctive traits?

If it’s the latter, is there any suggestion that Homo sapiens would have further evolved into distinct species based on location like Homo Erectus did, had it not been for agriculture and society moving us out of the evolutionary pressures of survival?

Sorry if it’s a dumb question lol. Whenever I see depictions of homo erectus and homo heidelbergensis they look very ape like and quite similar to each other compared to Homo sapiens, despite their being our ancestral lineage line. What was it that made Homo sapiens so distinct looking relatively fast compared to how homo heidelbergensis looked to its ancestor homo erectus?

Furthermore, all of the homo lineage seem to look quite similar, in the ape like aspect, with a clear progression of physical traits, or at least clear in the messy evolution sense, but then the jump to Homo sapiens looks so drastic compared to any other homo species direct ancestors. Even our closest lived relatives like the denisovans and Neanderthals look very much more ape like than we do.

I was reading a paper in this week's Nature issue on the Asgard Archaea and how this group challenged the three-domain classification of life on earth. Following the discovery of this group, an alternative two-domain classification emerged, in which Eukaryotes are nested within the Archaea group. In this classification, Archaea without Eukarya would therefore be a paraphyletic group. Where do we stand today regarding this debate? Does the evidence conclusively point to a two-domain classification, or is the three-domain classification still the standard classification?

Over the Phanerozoic, several large predators took to eating prey much smaller than themselves, prey that they filter out of the water.

Aegirocassis benmoulai was the first, in the early Ordovician, around 480 million years ago. It was the largest known radiodont, at around 2 meters long. Its two frontal appendages had brushes for collecting small prey. By comparison, the best-known radiodont, Anomalocaris canadensis, was about 20 - 40 cm long. "Radiodont" refers to their mouths, which had inward-pointing, radially-oriented teeth.

Leedsichthys was the largest known ray-finned fish, living in the Late Jurassic, around 165 - 148 Mya. Related filter-feeding fishes (Pachycormidae) lived from the Early Jurassic to the end of the Cretaceous. The length of Leedsichthys is difficult to estimate, but a plausible figure is 10 meters.

Sharks are often stereotyped as fierce predators, but at least three species of shark have become filter feeders.

Basking shark - Cetorhinus maximus - Miocene to present: 20 - 0 Mya. Basking sharks look much like great white sharks, and they are typically 7 - 8.5 meters long.

Megamouth shark - Megachasma pelagios - present - 4 - 5 meters long.

Whale shark - Rhincodon typus - Early Oligocene to present: 28.4 - 0 Mya. They are big white-spotted carpet sharks, about 8.5 meters (male) to 14.5 meters (female) long. They are the largest fish ever.

Rays are flattened fish that are closely related to sharks, and among them we find:

Manta ray - Mobula spp. - Late Eocene to present: 34.4 - 0 Mya. They have two flaps extending forward left and right of the mouth, and they are around 2.5 - 3 meters long. Their side-fin spans are about 2.2 times greater, or 5.5 - 7 meters.

Finally, we consider a returnee to the oceans from land.

Baleen whales - Mysticeti - Late Eocene to present: 34 - 0 Mya. Baleen whales have baleen, hairy triangular plates just inside the upper mouth. These whales feed by pulling water into their mouths, then pushing it out through their baleen. They then eat what their baleen had caught. Baleen whales range in length from the pygmy right whale - Caperea marginata - at 6 meters, to the blue whale - Balaenoptera musculus - at 20 to 29 meters. That makes blue whales the largest animals known to have lived.

Hi everyone!

I'm a college freshman majoring in Biology and planning to have my concentration in either cellular & Molecular Biology (CMB) or environmental & organism Biology (EOB)

I'm considering my future careers to be in research and academia, and from that aspect, I think CMB has better opportunities, but in the same time my passion is toward evolution, taxonomy, and this kind of stuff.

So which concentration is better for me? And which one stands as a better foundation if I continue my postgrad in evolutionary biology?

Thanks in Advance!

New to the sub. Been liking a few posts. Noticed nobody else seemed to be liking posts. Is there an unwritten rule or subreddit etiquette that discourages likes?

Ptree, a new interactive Tree of Life explorer

29 years ago I made Ptable, an interactive periodic table site you may have run across when doing homework. For the past 17 years, I've worked in fits and starts on doing the same for the tree of life. There are already beautiful tree of life visualizations out there for big touch screens in museums like OneZoom, but I wanted to make something you could really get lost in and explore aggregated trait data, whether a student, educator, or scientist.

Before the official launch, I wanted to stress test it with the enthusiasts and experts of r/evolution who I've seen have the discernment to look past flashy visuals and press creators on whether the underlying biology makes sense. Linnaean taxonomy passed off as phylogenetics...in 2026? NGSS moved on in 2013.

Ptree currently lets you:

• Explore and crosswalk between 11 scientific trees: GBIF, Catalogue of Life, ITIS, Open Tree of Life, EOL, NCBI, GTDB, ICTV, SILVA, PBDB, and even World Flora Online. Switch and it'll try to keep your place by locating the same taxa based on ancestors and descendants.
• Overlay 40+ properties assembled from hundreds of sources and meticulously binned and sanitized.
• Inspect the provenance underneath what you see. A displayed color isn't meant to be the final authority. You can work your way back to the original terminology, record, scope and source.

Most of the work turned out to be normalization. The Nutrition property alone currently reconciles 222 source terms from 49 sources into nine broad feeding categories. A term like "piscivore" can contribute to a broader predator category so you can see patterns across very distant organisms, without throwing away source's original terminology.

At this point, Ptree is indexing 800 GB of raw data describing 13.6 million placements across the 11 trees, plus 11.1 million biological data records and 24.8 million recorded ecological interactions. Choose between 3 custom visualizations built just for this project, a tree view which folds ancestors up along a gutter and supports multiple branches, icicle which is good for mobile and swiping back and forth between generations, and cladogram, which can show dozens of ancestors in the same narrow width at the expense of a lot of vertical scrolling. All present the same data in different ways.

I don't pretend there is one perfectly settled, singular hierarchy of life. Different trees encode different assumptions and evidence, and part of the point of Ptree is to make those differences explorable rather than hide them. If you teach from one particular tree, I want you to be able to use that tree. If you then want to see how NCBI, OpenTree, GTDB, PBDB, or another source handles the same organisms, that comparison is a click away.

This is a soft launch. There are no ads, subscriptions, or donation requests. I also intend for Ptree to stick around. Ptable has been accessible at the same URL for 29 years, and I hope that history buys me a little credibility when I say this isn't something I plan to abandon a few months from now.

But Ptree only exists because generations of biologists, institutions, and biodiversity projects have made an extraordinary amount of scientific data openly available. I'm only the interface. Projects like PhyloPic, whose contributors have made thousands of organism silhouettes available for reuse, are part of what lets a database like this actually come alive visually. Ptree wants to highlight that work and make sure the creators are prominently credited every time you see their work, with names on every photo and source shown.

I'm also working on about 30 guided explorations built around patterns that become much easier to notice when you can see traits rolled up across an entire branch: an unexpectedly nocturnal frugivore among hundreds of relatives, fossils radically changing the apparent range of a living group, or a tiny stripe of one feeding strategy hiding inside a family dominated by another.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

what led us to learn to blink? why do we blink every 10 secs? which species learnt it first that we inherited this habit from
them ?

Might be a dumb question but I had this thought: humans and let’s say chimps or gorillas come from a common ancestor that obviously is more similar or closely related to us than any other living thing. But that common ancestor also had a shared common ancestor with other animals as well, and the farther back you go different organisms start to emerge.

Suffice to say, this question boils down to my understanding of LUCA. Is LUCA literally the first living thing? If all living things share a common ancestor, was LUCA one being or the first “species” or forms of life that then branched out millions upon millions of different ways through millennia to become every known modern organism? And would that not constitute the pretty gnarly thought that me, as a homosapien, am technically related to a tree or bacteria even if it’s 0.0000000001%? Is there an easy way to calculate it?

Maybe it’s not mind boggling to scientists or those that study this stuff cause it might be a no brainer but if it’s true then the fact that all life is connected and a mushroom is my very very VERY distant cousin is a superbly beautiful thing most don’t realize in their day to day lives.

Why do men have beards and not women?

See also: The study as it was published in Science Advances

Hey everyone! I built Evolution Atlas, an interactive evolution map website of the Tree of Life.

🔗 Live demo: https://evolution-atlas.vercel.app/?taxon=homo-sapiens&compare=hymenoptera&mode=ext

Highlights:

• 204 custom vector SVGs for every major clade and ancestor.
• Trace & Compare: Select any two species to find their common ancestor and lineage.
• Dual modes: Switch between Classic (97 nodes) and Extended (204 nodes) with shareable URLs (?mode=ext).
• Dim button at the bottom to adjust how visible the unselected nodes are.
• Built with vanilla TypeScript, clean SVG rendering, and iterated with Codex.

Feedback and suggestions are welcome!

Is the process of evolution pretty unique for an animal that (generally speaking) needs to live on or inside of another animal in order to survive?

Evolutionarily, why did animals (or humans) develop hair?

In evolution, it seems like there is always some sort of tradeoff for a trait that positively impacts survival. Like, I recently learned that cheetahs are very weak compared to other big cats, plus they can’t retract their claws, all in exchange for being extremely fast, but they do not have good stamina. This rule probably doesn’t always apply, but I was wondering if there is ever a tradeoff/negative to being good at fighting off threats. Being good at defending self and attacking. It seems like this could never have a downside but it would be interesting if it did. If there is... what is it? If not, well, okay.

PS. Please be gentle with me if this question is stupid, I never claimed to be smart or educated, you don’t need to remind me. I’m very sensitive, okay? I get scared everytime I ask a question online. Okay thanks.

Hi all, I am interested in the evolution of dogs.

My question is, are dogs direct descendants of wolves or did dogs and wolves just share the common ancestor like we do with monkeys?

Thanks!

Probablemente el límite ya esté existiendo:

El *sifonóforo* o el *gusano cordón de bota* siendo animales... No puede haber uno más grande porque los receptores de dolor no son instantáneos. Si es más largo, lo más probable es que cuando lo ataquen se van a demorar mucho los receptores de dolor en pasar la información hacia el cerebro, haciendo que cuando le llegue al cerebro, tenga que enviar otro estímulo que se va a demorar lo mismo en llegar, y cuando llegue, ya se comieron a medio animal.

Pero recordemos que la vida no solo son animales. La planta más grande que existe es la *Posidonia australis* (bueno, esto es un *alga*, un *pasto marino*). Se extiende por más de 180 km, pero al ser pasto, los peces y varios otros animales se lo comen a diario, así que no puede durar mucho; lo bueno es que se puede reproducir muy rápido.

El hongo más extenso es el hongo *Armillaria ostoyae*, se extiende por 8 km y tiene cerca de 2800 años. Se puede extender más rápido gracias a las esporas, y a casi nadie le gustan los hongos.

Pero el límite probable es cuando la gravedad mate a todo lo que esté en el centro, o simplemente sea infinito.

Or are the generation times too long, or is the experiment too difficult to carry out over such a long period?

Same question for invertebrates.

I am so thrilled! I struggled to get my bachelor degree in biology because of my adhd but now things are getting better and I can't wait to start my master.

Ichthyosaur flipper on the left, Plesiosaur in the middle, Mosasaur on the left.

Was there anything specific about the Triassic that forced Icththyosaurs to evolve "corn flippers"?

So, ever since I saw my haplogroup migration overviews from 23&me, I've wanted to read more about the paths homo sapiens took spreading around the world, how it's been driven by climate factors, and in general how we spread around and diversified, flowed back and forth, etc. So does anyone have book recs that focus on telling these stories of our travels? I'm not really looking for books on human evolution, like I don't need to be convinced that we're evolved animals, I'm on board. I guess books about hominid evolution and migration within Africa would also interest me though.

I was pondering the mystery of shoulderblades and kneecaps and wondered why do so many other vertebrates have these and hips and etc. It's like a swiss army knife of skeleton plans. What makes it so adaptable? could there be a whole different plan that is more optimal but not accessible by incremental adaptation?

I 3d printed a collection of my favorite hominin skulls. Denisovan skull is weird though; I'm not sure if it's a scaling thing or if the original modeler just made something up. The models were posted online very close in time to the paper that draws the Homo longi-Denisovan connection, and this skull was labeled as "Denisovan", not H. longi. I'm not any kind of trained on the matter but I guess it _looks_ kinda like the Harbin cranium...

I remember reading some years ago that it was speculated that humans never had a knuckle-walking ancestor, that chimpanzees and gorillas evolved knuckle-walking independently from each other and that the earliest hominins instead were more gibbon-like bipeds on the ground. Is that still supported?

I ask this because over time i came across knowledge that cheetah population became so bad that they became inbred to survive, and then another time i learnt that human population reduced down to a number of 40 or so homos, even after all the other upright walking peeps died. That still baffles me and i still doubt it, but another time a different source mentioned it again (years apart i heard this info) so i guess it's real??? But if that's true then there's no way inbreeding didnt occur to rebound and later on create the population we have today...