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  2. Evidence of common descent - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_common_descent

    The history of the camel provides an example of how fossil evidence can be used to reconstruct migration and subsequent evolution. The fossil record indicates that the evolution of camelids started in North America (see figure 4e), from which, six million years ago, they migrated across the Bering Strait into Asia and then to Africa, and 3.5 ...

  3. Introduction to evolution - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_evolution

    Evolution does not strive for more advanced, more intelligent, or more sophisticated life forms. [25] For example, fleas (wingless parasites) are descended from a winged, ancestral scorpionfly, and snakes are lizards that no longer require limbs—although pythons still grow tiny structures that are the remains of their ancestor's hind legs.

  4. Transitional fossil - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil

    Specific examples of class-level transitions are: tetrapods and fish, birds and dinosaurs, and mammals and "mammal-like reptiles". The term "missing link" has been used extensively in popular writings on human evolution to refer to a perceived gap in the hominid evolutionary record. It is most commonly used to refer to any new transitional ...

  5. Evolution - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

    Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]

  6. Timeline of the evolutionary history of life - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the...

    Beginning of animal evolution. [54] [55] 720–630 Ma Possible global glaciation [56] [57] which increased the atmospheric oxygen and decreased carbon dioxide, and was either caused by land plant evolution [58] or resulted in it. [59] Opinion is divided on whether it increased or decreased biodiversity or the rate of evolution. [60] [61] [62 ...

  7. Recent human evolution - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution

    Cave paintings (such as this one from France) represent a benchmark in the evolutionary history of human cognition. Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin was the first to propose the out-of-Africa hypothesis for the peopling of the world, [39] but the story of prehistoric human migration is now understood to be much more complex thanks to twenty-first-century advances in genomic sequencing.

  8. Evolutionary developmental biology - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_developmental...

    Evidence for any such direction in evolution is however hard to acquire and can also result from developmental constraints that limit diversification. [75] For example, in the gastropods , the snail-type shell is always built as a tube that grows both in length and in diameter; selection has created a wide variety of shell shapes such as flat ...

  9. Coloration evidence for natural selection - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloration_evidence_for...

    Animal coloration provided important early evidence for evolution by natural selection, at a time when little direct evidence was available. Three major functions of coloration were discovered in the second half of the 19th century, and subsequently used as evidence of selection: camouflage (protective coloration); mimicry , both Batesian and ...