ATHENS, Ohio (Aug. 18, 2008) — Though skin cancer is deadly to male fish, it also has one perk: The black melanoma splotches arise from attractive natural markings that lure female mates. A new study ...

The stories of dinosaurs’ lives may be written in fossilized pigments, but scientists are still wrangling over how to read them. In September, paleontologists deduced a dinosaur’s habitat from ...

The chromatophore pattern on oval squid Left, a picture of a six-week old squid, with (right) a zoom in on the chromatophore pattern, with chromatophores highlighted by green dotted circles. The ...

The genetic underpinnings of pigmentation and colour patterning in fish encompass a complex interplay of gene regulation, cell fate determination and evolutionary innovation. Neural crest cells, which ...

Animal patterns are a source of endless fascination, and now researchers have worked out how zebrafish develop their stripes. Animal patterns -- the stripes, spots and rosettes seen in the wild -- are ...

On a day in October 2006, I sat in a dark laboratory at Yale University and zoomed in on the fossilized ink of a 200-million-year-old squid relative under an electron microscope. An ocean of ...

AMONG living things, mosaicism has come to mean the mixture in one organism of two or more genetically unlike cell lines. This difference may involve single genes, groups of genes or entire ...

I found this leaf (pictured) in a park in Oslo, Norway, a few weeks ago. What is the explanation for this pattern of green pigmentation? • The leaf shown is typical of a hazel leaf in autumn. At this ...

A red, crosshatched design adorning a rock from a South African cave may take the prize as the oldest known drawing. Ancient humans sketched the line pattern around 73,000 years ago by running a chunk ...