The St Bernard dog – named after the 11th century priest Bernard of Menthon – may have ironically challenged the theory of creationism, say scientists.

Scientists have discovered how a microscopic organism has benefited from nearly 80 million years without sex.

Embryologists at UCL (University College London) have helped solve an evolutionary riddle that has been puzzling scientists for over a century. They have identified a key mechanism in the initial stages of an embryo’s development that helps differentiate more highly evolved species, including humans, from less evolved species, such as fish.

From an evolutionary perspective, the primary task of an organism is to pass along its genes to future generations. Such genetic transmission is usually assumed to be instinctive.

“Survival of the fittest” has popularly described evolution for more than a century, but a new study published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters provides further evidence that random genetic mutations over millions of years may also play a powerful role.

If there were an evolutionary arms race between a small, hot animal and a cold, big animal, it’s going to be awfully hard for the cold, big animal to keep up.

Researchers have shown for the first time that fossils can be used as effectively as living species in understanding the complex branching in the evolutionary tree of life.

During evolution, many of a species’ properties are shaped by ecological interactions. This is readily evident in mammalian teeth, whose many features closely reflect what each species eats.

Europe's main human rights body will vote next month on a resolution opposing the teaching of creationist and intelligent design views in school science classes.

In 1911 the discovery that the world was billions of years old changed our view of the world for ever.

The fossil record seems to indicate that the diversity of marine creatures increased and decreased over hundreds of millions of years in step with predator-prey encounters, Virginia Tech geoscientists report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The wheels of evolution turn on genetic innovation -- new genes with new functions appear, allowing organisms to grow and adapt in new ways. But deciphering the history of how and when various genes appeared, for any organism, has been a difficult and largely intractable task.