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Categories: Mathematics: Statistics, Paleontology: Early Mammals and Birds

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Abrupt shifts in the evolution of animals -- short periods of time when an organism rapidly changes size or form -- have long been a challenge for theorists including Darwin. Now a newly published research paper supports the idea that even these abrupt changes are underpinned by a gradual directional process of successive incremental changes, as Darwin's theory of evolution assumes.

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A new data analysis tool has revealed the specific immune cell types associated with increased risk of death from COVID-19.

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Researchers have developed a computationally efficient method that could be used to identify anomalies in the U.S. power grid in real time. The novel technique augments a special type of machine-learning model with a powerful graph structure, and does not require any labeled data to train.

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New research uncovers the negative link between flight-worthiness and fight-worthiness in birds. Evolutionary pressure demanded that birds could either fly or arm themselves -- but not both. Furthermore, the new research suggests that developing wings and not bony spurs involved both sexual and natural selection. This insight helps us better understand how the enormous diversity of life and earth came to be.

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Time for a road trip. You punch the destination into your GPS and choose the suggested route. But is this shortest route the safest? Not necessarily, according to new findings.

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A team of geologists and palaeontologists has discovered that, some 50 million years ago, there was a low-lying continent separating Europe from Asia that they have named Balkanatolia. At the time, it was inhabited by an endemic fauna that was very different from those of Europe and Asia. Geographical changes 40 to 34 million years ago connected this continent to its two neighbors, paving the way for the replacement of European mammals by Asian mammals.

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Two new species of fossil birds that lived alongside the dinosaurs have ben discovered near the Great Wall of China. One of the new species had a sensitive, movable bony appendage at the tip of its lower jaw that it might have used to find food.

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Despite being among the most researched topics on supercomputers, a fundamental understanding of the effects of turbulent motion on fluid flows still eludes scientists. A new approach aims to change that.

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Scientists have discovered the first evidence of a unique respiratory infection in the fossilized remains of a dinosaur that lived nearly 150 million years ago. Researchers examined the remains of an immature diplodocid -- a long-necked herbivorous sauropod dinosaur, like 'Brontosaurus' - dating back to the Late Jurassic Period of the Mesozoic Era. The dinosaur nicknamed 'Dolly,' discovered in southwest Montana, had evidence of an infection in the area of its neck vertebrae.

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Researchers have developed a system based on computer vision techniques that allows automatic analysis of biomedical videos captured by microscopy in order to characterize and describe the behavior of the cells that appear in the images.

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Community structure, including relationships between and within groups, is foundational to our understanding of the world around us.

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Asymptomatic COVID-19 cases are the bane of computer modelers' existences -- they throw off the modeling data to an unknown degree. A new approach explores using historic epidemic data from eight different countries to estimate the transmission rate and fraction of under-reported cases.

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During the Ice Age, giant mammals such as mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and woolly rhinoceroses once roamed Northern Europe and America. The cold oceans of the northern hemisphere were also home to giants like Steller's sea cow, which grew up to eight meters long and weighed up to ten tons, and has been extinct for around 250 years. Now an international research team has succeeded in deciphering the genome of this ice-age species from fossil bones. They also found an answer to the question of what the genome of this extinct species of sea cow reveals about present-day skin diseases.

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Scientists have discovered a new fossil that reveals the origin of gills in arthropods.

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A new study leaves large tooth marks in previous conclusions about the body shape of the Megalodon, one of the largest sharks that ever lived.

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Researchers have built a machine learning framework that can define the mathematical equations describing a cell's trajectory from one state to another, such as its development from a stem cell into one of several different types of mature cell. The framework, called dynamo, can also be used to figure out the underlying mechanisms -- the specific cocktail of gene activity -- driving changes in the cell.

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Retrieving an accurate picture of what a tagged animal does as it journeys through its environment requires statistical analysis, especially when it comes to animal movement, and the methods statisticians use are always evolving to make full use of the large and complex data sets that are available. A recent study by researchers at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF) and the UBC department of statistics has taken us a step closer to understanding the behaviours of northern resident killer whales by improving statistical tools useful for identifying animal behaviours that can't be observed directly.

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Deeper analysis of fossils from one of Eastern Europe's most significant paleontological sites has led to the discovery of a new species of pangolin, previously thought to have existed in Europe during the early Pleistocene but not confirmed until now.

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A new study has found that a class of toxins found in snake and mammalian venom evolved from the same ancestral gene.

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A new study has provided the most detailed timeline of mammal evolution to date.