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 ...

This rainforest tree solved one of evolution’s hardest problems. Here’s how it evolved to use tension and geometry to fire ...

To understand the origins of multicelled life, researchers are studying a motley assortment of simpler animal relatives. The commonalities they’re unearthing offer a trove of clues about our mutual ...

"This book was originally published as an issue of Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society B; Biological sciences (volume 363; number 1496) but has been materially changed and updated"--Title ...

Recent research published in Nature has transformed our understanding of animal evolution by revealing that ctenophores, also known as comb jellies, represent the earliest branch of the animal tree of ...

A groundbreaking study has traced the 66-million-year evolutionary history of primates and overturned conventional thought that our ancestors originally inhabited warm tropical forests. Using advanced ...

To understand how organisms are related, researchers use molecular information to construct phylogenetic trees. Most of the time, scientists use thousands of protein-coding sequences to determine ...

One of the biggest quests in biology is understanding how every cell in an animal's body carries an identical genome yet still gives rise to a kaleidoscope of different cell types and tissues. A ...