Imagine zooming out on a giant family tree that includes every bird you have ever seen. Ostriches sprint across open plains, ...

Why do you have five fingers? Why not ten, or twenty, or one? Why do so many animals have five fingers? Five seems to be the perfect number for most hands. Oddly, the first vertebrates to come onto ...

Birds are the most diverse land vertebrate on the planet, and now scientists have constructed a complete evolutionary tree of the 11,000 or so known species. This data came from hundreds of studies ...

Duplicated genes that appear in every branch of the tree of life can provide us with insight into the evolution that occurred ...

In a world where evolutionary biology often gets boiled down to simplistic hierarchies of "primitive" and "advanced" species, a new book by University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) biologist ...

All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called "last universal common ancestor" represents the ...

The world’s largest butterfly tree of life is helping researchers determine where the winged insects originated when they first appeared on Earth about 100 million years ago. During the age of the ...