Evolutionary

What's in a head? According to new research, a little bit of our ancestors' tails.In the early days of complex, multicellular life on Earth, animals started out without any spines or brains. They only had a network of neurons spread throughout their body. Over the course of millions of years, however, that system somehow became concentrated on one end. But how?  Tunicates, or 'sea squirts', are the closest living relatives of vertebrates, and they don't have a true head.Their central nervous system is instead made up of…

Scientists have discovered a clever mimicry trick used by some bats: they'll buzz like hornets when they think they're under threat from predators, giving the sonic impression they're more dangerous than they actually are.  It's the first time behavior like this has been recorded in mammals, but it happens elsewhere in the animal kingdom – such as when the wings of moths are patterned to appear like the insect is actually a different, much more dangerous species. The technical term for it is Batesian mimicry.The team…

This is an artist’s illustration of a supermassive black hole that is inside the dust-shrouded core of a vigorously star-forming “starburst” galaxy. It will eventually become an extremely bright quasar once the dust is gone. The research team believes that the object, discovered in a Hubble deep-sky survey, could be the evolutionary “missing link” between quasars and starburst galaxies. The dusty black hole dates back to only 750 million years after the big bang. Credit: NASA, ESA, N. BartmannAn international team of…