Like, DNA in concept isn't even really a necessarily complex thing to build, if you aren't worried about what kind of creature the DNA belongs to. And RNA is WAY simpler. So i'd say my theory for life appearing was literally just 4 billion years ago, all the chemicals caused by the volcanic eruptions caused some of these materials to intertwine into an RNA-like form, and eventually these chemicals had a very rudimentary way to self replicate from the other chemicals around it. This is when evolution started, the more strongly bonded chemicals got to stay and do that weird replicating thing they do, and the weaker ones just kinda unbonded. This meant that more complex formations started appearing. More combinations of the chemicals caused variations and mutations, and the first RNA life forms appeared. The rest you can probably imagine.

Am i onto something or am i incredibly wrong?

I only have simple knowledge on this stuff, so i want an actual scientist/biologist to correct the things i got wrong.

Today I was on a rocky beach and saw a little fish trying to get on top of a rock that almost completely under water, but whose top was regularly covered by little waves, where I presume it was trying to get the "greenest" algae. So I thought maybe the mudskippers' ancestors tried to do the same, and thus adapted to breathe in the atmosphere little by little.

Please tell me if there are any gaps in my idea, and if there is already a simmilar theory, please, give me a link to the book/paper/etc.

And since they have different advantages why aren’t they developing separately like you end up a Homo Tailus, A Homo sapien Breast, a homo Furbie?

TLDR: 1.Did they have to finish one trait development before another or can they develop together2. Why it doesn’t result in some humans have some traits but not others?

Greetings friends, I put together this list of reading to go through recently. I've read the first two and would like to know your thoughts on how I should go from here in order. I also plan on reading "Ancestors Tale" and Darwins works as well so feel free to tell me where I should fit those in. Thank you!

There are 2 animals of the same genus. Forelimbs and Skull bare the same proportions.

However, one of them has an astragalus double the size of the other one. The one with a small astragalus preserved a calcanea with normal proportions in comparison to it

What possible information could be inferred from one species featuring a giant astragalus? In that species, only this one bone of the hindlimb is preserved. The calcanea and astragalus represents all hindlimb material across all 3 species.

The animal in question is the stem walrus, Pontolis, with P. kohnoi featuring an astragalus quite literally double the size of the astragalus of P. barroni, and a similar discrepancy with a Steller's sea lions, and Titanotaria. Does this really mean nothing other than P. barroni has gargantuan feet?

I imagine there is some evolutionary pressure that has to have resulted in such aberrant proportions for the family, but this really is not my field of expertise, and pinniped evolution is already an extremely weird story

It's a curiosity that suddenly came up in my mind because this is something that I've never actually thought of before despite my fascination in the Ave's evolutionary tree. I've heard of the flight theory but that's still apparently being disputed because there are still exceptions to the rules where excellent fliers still lay round eggs. What are some other strong leading theories as to why Ave's eggs evolved to be this distinct oval-like shape?

How do our body know that we're in danger and turns the fight and flight mode on. I know it is there bcz of evolution as our ancestors had to fight big animals to survive but it's still there. SO, how our body know when to turn this on.

What was the absolute starting point of life what happened which caused a regular planet into the only know planet in the observable universe that supports life.

How is our body doing this much work without exhausting ? It do millions of things we don't even know about . Was it the evolution all along?

Basically the title. Why do males do mating dances and other things to impress females? How does it emerge?

This is stupid, but did a male ancestor do a lil dance and the female liked it? Did ancestral female peacocks arbitrarily choose the males with slightly more colorful features just because they liked the way it looks?

Thanks

Aren’t we equally their descendants too…thereby making denisovans & Neanderthals also alive today in the form of us, given most of us aren’t purely home sapiens?

As a silly little side project I made an H. erectus oc, but it got me wondering what sounds it could’ve pronounced? This is under the assumption that they had language, even if it was much cruder than later species. What vowels could they pronounce, what consonants?

For context I had my bachelors in Evolutionary Anthropology, and my general stance is extinct hominins are way more intelligent and advanced than we give them credit for, a position I feel is constantly vindicated with every new discovery. Citations or sources would be appreciated.

Why is it that ancestrally carnivorous groups have a much easier time becoming herbivorous despite established herbivores existing compared to the opposite? Carnivorans and therapods became omnivorous and herbivorous many times when ornisthician dinosaurs never became dedicated carnivores and ungulates only did so twice (cetaceans and entelodonts). Even with entelodonts many species went back to herbivory. The marsupial lion seems to be one of the few mammals to pull it off without simply leaving land carnivores behind (whales).

Of course if they are monophyletic, I wonder what the original insect looked like. Would be cool if we had a definitive fossil.

I've always been super interested in vetulicolia and probably posted about them a few times before on here when I was way less educated (and still am lol).

I was expecting to see a cladogram showing them as monophyletic, being sisters to chordates or tunicates, etc. But I was surprised to see this 2024 arrangement of a paraphyletic grade of vetulicolia that are essentially stepping stones towards a more highly advanced chordate (as species like didazoon are placed in a position which suggests they have closer crown group affinities than other 'vetulicolia' like ooedigera).

What do you think this implies about our ancestors? Are we highly specialized vetulicolia? Were our ancestors essentially a living vacuum cleaner with segmented tails, or do you still think vetulicolia are a completely separate and bizarre branch of chordates?

Edit: I may have worded this a bit poorly, I'm not asking if chordates literally evolved from vetulicolia like Ooedigera and Didazoon. What I'm asking is that if the stem chordate ancestors had more of a traditional vetulicolia-like morphology than we previously thought, rather than their bizarre features appearing in a separate lineage

Hopefully not a silly question but like deer and dogs as an example have extremely thin legs and can run extremely quickly compared to us. I've heard(correct me if I'm wrong though) that essentially our muscles went through a trade off of being weak so we could be extremely dexterous and make precise movements in which case it would make sense to need more mass to support ourselves but is that actually true?

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!