Biologists have long drawn the animal family tree with a hazy base, unsure which creature first split from the common ancestor that gave rise to everything from jellyfish to humans. Now, a new genomic ...

If you look different to your close relatives, you may have felt separate from your family. As a child, during particularly stormy fallouts you might have even hoped it was a sign that you were ...

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology today announced the release of a new online tool for studying biodiversity and the ...

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 ...

Spider webs present an intriguing challenge to evolutionary biologists. These finely honed death traps come in many forms, from the trampoline-like construction of the sheet web spider, to the ...

Birds are the only dinosaur lineage that survived until today. About 66 million years ago at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary, a mass extinction event destroyed all non-avian dinosaurs, ...

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 ...

Tree thinking is a pedagogical approach that emphasises the interpretation and construction of phylogenetic trees to elucidate evolutionary relationships. In the context of evolutionary biology ...