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Being kicked out of its coral home may have forced the evolution of a new species of fish, say Australian scientists. Research published in today's issue of the journal Current Biology provides more support for the idea that geographic isolation is not always needed for new species to develop. Marine biologist, Dr Philip Munday of James Cook University in Townsville and team studied a new species of coral-dwelling goby fish found in southern Papua New Guinea to try and see how it evolved. The most established doctrine of how new species form is that a group of organisms becomes separated...

Atlanta (August 4,2004)It's no secret that life in the 21st century moves at a rapid pace. Human inventions such as the Internet, mobile phones and fiber optic cable have increased the speed of communication, making it possible for someone to be virtually in two places at once. But can humans speed up the rate of one of nature's most basic and slowest processes, evolution? A study by J. Todd Streelman, new assistant professor of biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that humans may have sped up the evolutionary clock for one species of fish. Cichlid fish are well...

The first eyewitness to the birth of a new species may be a University of Arizona graduate student. Her new findings could help biologists identify and understand the precise genetic changes that lead one species to evolve into two separate species. Laura K. Reed and her advisor Therese Markow, a UA Regents' Professor, made the discovery by observing breeding patterns of fruit flies that live on rotting cacti in western deserts. Whether the closely related fruit fly populations, designated Drosophila mojavensis and Drosophila arizonae, represent one species or two is still debated by biologists, testament to the UA researchers’ assertion...

In what has been described as the "perfect experiment," evolutionary biologists at the University of Chicago replaced a single gene in fruit flies and discovered a mechanism by which two different "races" begin to become different species, with one group adapted to life in the tropics and the other suited to cooler climates. The tropical group was more tolerant of starvation but less tolerant of cold. The temperate group was less able to resist starvation but better adapted to cool weather. The altered gene also changed the flies' pheromones, chemical signals that influence mating behavior. As a result, the researchers...

Scottish scientist had floated similar theory in 1794 but few noticed Charles Darwin's landmark theory of evolution, described in The Origin of Species in 1859, was anticipated 65 years earlier by a scientist living and working in Edinburgh, newly published research says. Unfortunately, prescient geologist James Hutton wrote in a nearly impenetrable literary style and buried what would later turn out to be revolutionary concepts in a 10-page chapter in a 2,250-page book. Mr. Hutton has been called the "founder of modern geology" because he was the first to say geological records showed that the earth was millions and not...

Thu July 3, 2003 01:59 PM ET SAO PAULO, Brazil (Reuters) - Scientists in Brazil's Amazon say they have discovered a new fish, something that has not happened for more than a century, and hope to categorize the small eel-like creature by the end of the year. "It's a new species which will require us to create a new genus and a whole new family to accommodate it," Jansen Zuanon, head aquatic biology researcher at Brazil's National Amazon Research Institute, or Inpa, told Reuters on Thursday.