Filtered to Evolutionary Biology · show all articles
A dense ear bone identifies a whale in a wolf-shaped skeleton, an ankle bone settled a fight between fossils and genes, and living embryos still grow and dissolve a hind leg. The walk from land to sea left a bush, not a ladder.
One skeletal plan builds a bat's wing, a whale's flipper, a horse's leg and a human hand. Owen catalogued it in 1849; Darwin explained it with an ancestor. The evidence is sharpest where that inherited plan builds a worse machine than a fresh design would.
Kettlewell's moths made industrial melanism the classroom proof of natural selection. A critique nearly got it pulled from the textbooks. Then the critic spent seven years and 4,864 more moths finding out who was right.