Andrew Knoll and a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Carnegie Institution for Science, used a metric they termed "swing factor" to determine the ecological impact from the change in the number of animals within each palaeo-community in a given time-frame. The study, published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showed that of the five...

A long-running and fiercely debated question among scientists "Did spiders evolve to spin the orb web only once? Or multiple times?" may have an answer in a new study in Current Biology, led by a team of researchers including Gonzalo Giribet and postdoctoral fellow, Rosa Fernández. The research team compared approximately 2,500 genes from 159...