Deep-sea fish study reveals evolutionary marvels in Earth's hadal zone

dolphins – had to evolve for aeons to develop specialised organs and a hydrodynamic body. The Sapiens in Indonesia, descendants of apes who lived on the African savannah, became Pacific seafarers without growing flippers and without having to wait for their noses to migrate to the top of their heads as whales did.

One way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. The history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events, both big and very, very big. The impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like seventy-five percent of all species on earth. No one wept for them, and, eventually, new speci

Sadly, there’s only one Earth, we can’t rewind time, and these contingency versus convergence experiments remain possible only with microbes in a science lab. For the moment, though, it seems that Lenski and Blount—and a much larger team of researchers who have worked on the LTEE—have resolved the contingency versus convergence debate: to us, the w

The cavern the forty-niners chanced upon is now known as Devils Hole and the “minnows” as Devils Hole pupfish, or, scientifically speaking, Cyprinodon diabolis. Devils Hole pupfish are, as Manly described them, about an inch long. They are sapphire blue, with intense black eyes and heads that are large for their body size. They’re most easily disti

Now it’s apparent that nature runs as a massively interconnected system, with the deep sea as its motherboard. Yet even as we tinker with the machinery in potentially irreversible ways, we have only the foggiest notion of how it all works.