Sam Walters on Muck Rack

Sam Walters

United States
As seen in: Discover Magazine, MSN, Substack, Flipboard, Astronomy Magazine, NewsBreak, RealClear Science, RealClear History, Discover

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Sam Walters’s Biography

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Sam Walters is the associate editor at Discover Magazine. For Discover’s website, Sam covers topics including archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution, along with an assortment of other scientific studies. Sam also assigns and edits features for Discover’s print magazine and manages the History Lessons and Hot Science sections.

Before joining the Discover team in 2022, Sam studied journalism and history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and served as a Leopold Fellow a…

Articles

Modern Humans and Neanderthals May Share Genetic Regions Linked to Complex Language

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By Sam Walters
| Discover Magazine
Language is one of the things that makes modern humans modern. Since the start of our species, we’ve communicated complex ideas in complex ways, with structured systems of rules related to sounds, words, and sentences. Now, a new study helps explain how this works from a genetic perspective. Published in Science Advances, the study turns to Human Ancestor Quickly Evolved Regions (HAQERs), genetic regulatory regions in the human genome.
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Modern Humans Arose in Africa — Here’s How Malaria Shaped Their Sub-Saharan Movement

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By Sam Walters
| Discover Magazine
Disease has shaped human history for a long time, from the first pandemics of bubonic plague to the first bouts of cholera, influenza, and, eventually, COVID-19. But how long has disease influenced the survival and spread of modern humans, exactly? A new paper has harnessed environmental and epidemiological data to show that malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum informed how human populations moved throughout sub-Saharan Africa around 74,000 to 5,000 years ago.
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A “Uniquely Sucky Specimen,” This Smashed 205-Million-Year-Old Skull Demonstrates Early Dinosaur Diversity

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By Sam Walters
| Discover Magazine
Learn more about the “folded” fossil of Ptychotherates bucculentus, from one of the first families of carnivorous dinosaurs. Written bySam Walters 2026-04-16T15:00:00 | 3 min read Ptychotherates bucculentus was a carnivorous dinosaur from the Late Triassic, around 210 to 205 million years ago. The species itself is described from a smashed skull, which offers important insights into the Triassic-Jurassic transition.(Image Courtesy of Simba Srivastava.
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