An artist’s reconstruction of the locomotor behavior and paleoenvironment of Lufengpithecus. This extinct primate lived in East Asia during the Miocene. “It would have been about the size of a ...

The inner ear may not seem like a particularly bony place, but human ears in fact have three small bones (also known as ossicles): the malleus, the incus and the stapes. While most people would assume ...

The inner ear, a complex sensory apparatus incorporating the cochlea, semicircular canals, and otolithic organs, is pivotal for auditory perception and balance. Recent multidisciplinary research has ...

Hot or not? Peeking inside an animal’s ear — even a fossilized one — may tell you whether it was warm- or cold-blooded. Using a novel method that analyzes the size and shape of the inner ear canals, ...

A study published in Nature Communications describes evolutionary changes in Neanderthal morphology through the analysis of ...

A new study of a 7–8-million-year-old extinct fossil ape from China called Lufengpithecus offers new insights into the evolution of human bipedalism. The study, published in The Innovation, was ...

For the first two weeks of life, mice with a hereditary form of deafness have nearly normal neural activity in the auditory system, according to a new study. Previous studies indicate that this early ...

One of the things that makes mammals, mammals is that we’re warm-blooded-- our bodies have high metabolisms that maintain our internal temperature independent of our surroundings, unlike cold-blooded ...

Warm-bloodedness is a key mammal trait, but it's been a mystery when our ancestors evolved it. A new study points to an unlikely source for telling a fossil animal's body temperature: the size of tiny ...