Blurs

For hundreds of millions of years, insects have been remarkably successful. They can fly,  burrow, and swim. They live inside plants, on plants, beneath rocks, in soil, in freshwater and almost everywhere else imaginable. Today, more than a million insect species have been formally described. Yet the further back we travel, the stranger their story becomes. The earliest chapters of insect evolution are largely missing from the fossil record. There is a notorious gap between the earliest evidence of hexapods and the much richer Carboniferous record. Now a newly described fossil from Texas is helping fill part of that gap. And it doesn't look quite like the insect evolutionary story we might expect. The creature, named Chosha praecursor, lived approximately 324 million years ago during the Late Mississippian Epoch. It possessed recognisably insect-like features, including an ovipositor and terminal filament. But it also had something modern insects don't have: multiple segmented ...

Around 74,000 years ago, something happened that makes almost every volcanic eruption in human history look insignificant. A volcano in what is now Indonesia erupted with extraordinary force. The eruption was so enormous that it left behind a vast volcanic depression known as the Toba caldera. Millions of tonnes of volcanic material were blasted into the atmosphere. Ash travelled enormous distances. The climate was affected.  And the eruption occurred at a critical point in human prehistory. Our species already existed, but humanity was far from dominant. There were relatively small populations of Homo sapiens scattered across Africa and perhaps beyond. Other human species were still alive. Neanderthals occupied large parts of Europe and western Asia. Denisovans lived somewhere across Asia. And numerous populations of other hominins had existed before them. Then Toba erupted. The obvious question is: Did this enormous volcanic catastrophe change the course of human evolution? Perha...

For most of Earth's history, there was no obvious reason to expect humans. There were forests. Oceans. Changing climates. Mass extinctions. Predators and prey. And millions of different evolutionary experiments taking place simultaneously. Our own lineage was just one of them. Today, humans are the only living primate capable of building cities, launching spacecraft and transforming the planet on a geological scale. But that raises an intriguing question. Was our evolutionary path unique — or could other primates once have been heading in a similar direction before environmental catastrophe changed everything? And an even more provocative possibility: Could a primate lineage have developed considerably greater intelligence, only to be pushed backwards — or wiped out — by environmental catastrophe? There is no evidence that an advanced non-human primate civilisation existed. But the underlying evolutionary question is entirely legitimate. Evolution isn't a straight line One of t...

The Alien Who Dated a Chimp The first visitor from the stars did not arrive in a blazing warship or a cathedral-sized ark. He came alone. His species had crossed impossible distances not to conquer worlds but simply to study them.  Their civilization was billions of years old. They had catalogued galaxies, watched stars ignite and fade, and seen countless intelligent species rise and disappear.  Earth, however, fascinated them for one simple reason. It had so much potential. Sixty-four million years after the dinosaurs vanished, mammals flourished across the planet. Forests covered continents, oceans teemed with life, and among the trees of central Africa lived clever, social primates that seemed just one evolutionary nudge away from something extraordinary. They had spent centuries observing Earth and its 'chimpanzee' troops. Though separated by millions of years of evolution and an unimaginable gulf in biology, they formed a genuine bond with these inquisitive, yet mischevio...