The more we discover about our species' family tree, the harder it becomes to pinpoint when exactly Homo sapiens emerged, ...

This eventual process of speciation by natural selection is illustrated by a sketch drawn by Darwin in his personal notebook nearly 20 years before the Origin of Species was published (Figure 1).

This hypothesis predicts that the fossil record at any one site is unlikely to record the process of speciation. If a site records that the ancestral species lived there, the new species would ...

The biological equivalent is "allopatric speciation," an evolutionary process in which one species divides into two because the original homogenous population has become separated and both groups ...

Complete human, chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and orangutan genomes have provided us a window into understanding the complex speciation process of these species' common ancestor. Analyses of these ...

But according to a study published this week in Nature, new species can arise arbitrarily and without provocation, challenging the widely held notion that physical isolation and selection are the ...

Transforming an untamed wolf into an obedient sausage dog or clingy chihuahua requires some serious time and genetic alchemy, yet new research suggests the process may have been simpler than you'd ...

Part of the difficulty is that speciation is an historical process, which makes it tricky to document. Being able to watch it unfold as it happens would be like catching lightning in a bottle.