For years, the appendix carried a reputation as the body’s most pointless organ. Doctors often removed it without hesitation, and textbooks labeled it a vestigial structure—something our ancestors ...

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 ...

For more than a century, the human appendix has been written off as a biological relic, a shrunken leftover from plant-eating ancestors that serves no real purpose. That view is now outdated. A ...

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 ...

Pity the poor appendix, a 2- to 4-inch-long wormlike pouch dangling from the head of the cecum, where the large and small intestines meet. For most of its medical history — anatomists have known about ...