Across generations, inherited variation and natural selection can alter populations and produce new lineages. This collection explains adaptation, speciation, common ancestry, evolutionary evidence, and the major transitions that have shaped life.
When a nearly complete Archaeopteryx skeleton emerged from Bavarian limestone in 1861, its timing seemed almost theatrical. Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species only two years earlier. Here was an animal with fully formed feathers as well as teeth, clawed fingers, and a long chain...
The limestone quarried around Solnhofen in Bavaria can split into sheets with surfaces so smooth and even that they transformed both printing and paleontology. Printers valued the stone because a drawing could be reproduced from its fine-grained surface. Paleontologists value the same rock because...
An antibiotic can transform a bacterial population in hours. Susceptible cells stop growing or die, while a few resistant cells persist and multiply into the space left behind. To a patient, the drug may appear to have taught the infection how to resist treatment. Biologically, the process is...
The peppered moth did not alter its wings during its own lifetime. Instead, Britain’s moth populations underwent a rapid change in the proportions of two inherited forms. Pale, speckled moths had once been common. As industrial pollution transformed woodland surfaces, a nearly black form spread...
Darwin’s finches are often presented as if they gave Charles Darwin an instant revelation about evolution. The real history is less tidy and more revealing. When Darwin visited the Galápagos Islands in 1835, he collected small birds with a striking range of bills, but he did not carefully label...