Vestigial structures take many forms: organs, behaviors, and even biochemical processes. Their defining characteristic is they are structures that a species has retained, but no longer serve their ...

The body is a glorious thing. Humans have evolved to have straight fingers rather than curved, pelvises designed to support upright walking and brains that have tripled in bulk. But evolution also has ...

People have speculated over the nature of seemingly useless physical characteristics in living things for thousands of years. It wasn't until the late 18th and early 19th centuries, though, that the ...

VESTIGIAL organs have long been a source of perplexity and irritation for doctors and of fascination for the rest of us. In 1893, a German anatomist named Robert Wiedersheim drew up a list of 86 human ...

Darren Curnoe receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Wisdom teeth, the palmaris longis tendon, ear wiggling: these qualities were desirable millions of years ago, but due to changes in ...

Pet owners, you know the look: Your cat hears you pouring the Purina, and suddenly she’s all ears. As she stops in her tracks and turns to face you, her ears swivel straight toward the sound of all ...

The human tailbone, also known as the coccyx, is a vestigial feature, meaning it has lost its original function in the body over the course of evolution. The human tailbone is a leftover feature from ...

Why do many people have hair on their big toe? Why do you have a tailbone? And what about wisdom teeth? There are many parts of our body that have become useless to humans but were not always useless.