Featured series 
Tag: Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
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Nation & World
‘Settle down,’ warns E.O. Wilson
Esteemed biologist Edward O. Wilson called for renewed efforts to understand and conserve the planet’s biodiversity, in the first of three Prather Lectures being presented this week.
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Nation & World
Killer mushrooms!
It is thought to have been responsible for the deaths of emperors. In parts of California’s forests, it is everywhere. It is the deathcap mushroom, Amanita phalloides, so filled with…
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Nation & World
When success spells defeat
Invasive plants are beneficiaries of climate change in Thoreau’s woods.
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Nation & World
Sperm competition, cooperation
Some mouse sperm can discriminate between their brethren and the competing sperm from other males, showing an unusual behavioral complexity.
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Nation & World
Tracking genetic traits over time
Fossils may provide tantalizing clues to human history, but they also lack some vital information, such as revealing which pieces of human DNA have been favored by evolution because they…
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Nation & World
Orphan army ants join nearby colonies
Normal 0 0 1 415 2369 19 4 2909 11.1282 0 0 0 Colonies of army ants, whose long columns and marauding habits are the stuff of natural-history legend, are…
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Nation & World
Genetic sex determination let ancient species adapt to ocean life
A new analysis of extinct sea creatures suggests that the transition from egg-laying to live-born young opened up evolutionary pathways that allowed these ancient species to adapt to and thrive…
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Nation & World
Mice living in Sandhills quickly evolved lighter coloration
A vivid illustration of natural selection at work: Harvard scientists have found that deer mice quickly evolved lighter coloration after glaciers deposited sand dunes atop what had been much darker soil.
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Nation & World
Freshwater fish at top of food chain evolve more slowly
Since evolving to eat other fish, freshwater fish at the top of the food chain have remained relatively unchanged compared with their insect- and snail-eating cousins, according to new research.…
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Nation & World
Maternal, paternal genes’ tug-of-war may last well into childhood
An analysis of rare genetic disorders in which children lack some genes from one parent suggests that maternal and paternal genes engage in a subtle tug-of-war well into childhood, and…
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Nation & World
The way of the digital dodo
The National Science Foundation-funded, three-year effort aims to create 3-D digital models of each species represented in Harvard’s collection of 12,000 bird skeletons.
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Nation & World
The evolution of Darwin
In a fitting celebration of a man whose ideas revolutionized science, Harvard marked Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday in style.
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Nation & World
Exploring hidden life’s abundance
Two miles below the surface of the Sargasso Sea lies a depression in the Earth’s crust filled with sediment and, scientists believe, teeming with life — exotic, microscopic, and very…
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Nation & World
Records dating back to Thoreau show some sharp shifts in plant flowering near Walden Pond
Drawing on records dating back to the journals of Henry David Thoreau, scientists at Harvard University have found that different plant families near Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., have borne…
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Nation & World
Boning up on frogs’ defenses
Harvard biologists have determined that some African frogs carry concealed weapons: when threatened, these species puncture their own skin with sharp bones in their toes, using the bones as claws…
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Nation & World
Mars’ water appears to have been too salty to support life
A new analysis of the Martian rock that gave hints of water on the Red Planet — and, therefore, optimism about the prospect of life — now suggests the water…
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Nation & World
Hauser presents theory of “humaniqueness”
Shedding new light on the great cognitive rift between humans and animals, a Harvard University scientist has synthesized four key differences in human and animal cognition into a hypothesis on…
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Nation & World
Gonzalo Giribet
They had sifted through the forest floor’s leaves and dirt for days, looking for a tiny type of daddy longlegs native to New Zealand, but had little more than dirty…
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Nation & World
Research highlights the muscle’s many motions
New research from Harvard’s Concord Field Station has shown that the common perception of a muscle as a single functional unit is incorrect and that different sections within an individual…
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Nation & World
Forests, reefs, mountaintop illuminate tropical biology
Morning came in the middle of the night in the hikers’ hut partway up the side of Borneo’s towering Mount Kinabalu. At 2 a.m., after just a few hours’ sleep,…
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Nation & World
Pressured by predators, lizards see rapid shift in natural selection
Countering the widespread view of evolution as a process played out over the course of eons, evolutionary biologists have shown that natural selection can turn on a dime – within…
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Nation & World
Students search for Thompson Island’s hoppers
Education met hands-on science on Boston Harbor’s Thompson Island on Oct. 9, 2006, as roughly 100 Harvard undergraduates fanned out from beach to beach collecting insects to be included in…
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Nation & World
Spring in your step helps avert disastrous stumbles
From graceful ballerinas to clumsy-looking birds, everyone occasionally loses their footing. New Harvard University research suggests that it could literally be the spring, or damper, in your step that helps…
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Nation & World
Beetles’ past tells volumes about tropical evolution
Experts seeking to explain the amazing diversity of the tropical rain forest have typically done so in two ways, viewing forests as either “evolutionary cradles” that encourage the rapid development…
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Nation & World
Finding a fossilized needle in an Arctic haystack
The first season searching Arctic Canada for a fossil that would illuminate how our ancestors first crawled onto land proved Harvard Professor Farish Jenkins’ explorer’s maxim: Never go any place…
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Nation & World
Wakeley examines ancestral lines
John Wakeley is devising new ways to trace the evolutionary road taken by humans and the creatures with whom we share planet Earth by creating new models that examine how…
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Nation & World
Evolution follows few possible paths to antibiotic resistance
Darwinian evolution follows very few of the available mutational pathways to attain fitter proteins, researchers at Harvard University have found in a study of a gene whose mutant form increases bacterial resistance to a widely prescribed antibiotic by a factor of roughly 100,000.
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Nation & World
Newly found species fills evolutionary gap between fish and land animals
Paleontologists have discovered fossils of a species that provides the missing evolutionary link between fish and the first animals that walked out of water onto land about 375 million years…
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Nation & World
Wing color not just for looks
Harvard and Russian researchers have documented natural selection’s role in the creation of new species through a process called reinforcement, where butterfly wing colors differ enough to avoid confusion with…
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Nation & World
A tale of a venomous dispute
Sea spiders as large as a foot across have been seen crawling along the deep ocean floor from the windows of submersible research vessels. Most of them, however, including those in a Harvard study, are a scant millimeter (.04 inch) in size. But big or small, they boast long snouts, on either side of which…