For millions of years, mammoths lumbered across Europe, Asia and North America. Starting roughly 15,000 years ago, the giant animals began to vanish from their vast range until they survived on only a few islands.

Eventually they disappeared from those refuges, too, with one exception: Wrangel Island, a land mass the size of Delaware over 80 miles north of the coast of Siberia. There, mammoths held on for thousands of years — they were still alive when the Great Pyramids were built in Egypt.

Continue reading “The Last Stand of the Woolly Mammoths” →

A flounder looks like a hallucination of a fish. Its body is flat as a pancake, its head permanently tilted to one side, and instead of having one eye on each side of its head, both eyes are crowded on one side.

This anatomy, as weird as it may be, is one of evolution’s remarkable success stories. Flounder, like more than 800 other species of flatfish, lie flat on the sea floor, their two eyes gazing up at the water overhead. When a smaller fish swims by, a flatfish shoots up and strikes. One species, the Pacific halibut, can grow to the size of a barn door.

Continue reading “How Flounder Wound Up With an Epic Side-Eye” →

For thousands of years, philosophers have argued about the purpose of language. Plato believed it was essential for thinking. Thought “is a silent inner conversation of the soul with itself,” he wrote.

Many modern scholars have advanced similar views. Starting in the 1960s, Noam Chomsky, a linguist at M.I.T., argued that we use language for reasoning and other forms of thought. “If there is a severe deficit of language, there will be severe deficit of thought,” he wrote.

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ADVENTURES IN VOLCANOLAND: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves, by Tamsin Mather

I live on a hump of pink granite, part of a geological formation that stretches across southern Connecticut, lurching out of the ground here and there like a pod of surfacing whales.

Before my wife and I bought our house, we had an inspector give it a look. “Well,” he said, “your foundation goes down a thousand miles into the Earth — so nothing to worry about there.”

Over the past 500 million years, vertebrates have evolved into a staggering variety of forms, from hummingbirds to elephants, bullfrogs to hammerhead sharks, not to mention our peculiar species of upright ape. But underneath all that diversity, vertebrates share some key features.

We all have a backbone made of vertebrae, for example, along with a skull that houses a brain. We share these hallmarks because we all descended from a common ancestor: a fish that swam in the Cambrian seas.

Continue reading “Was This Sea Creature Our Ancestor? Scientists Turn a Famous Fossil on Its Head.” →