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 ...

New research suggests that determining evolutionary trees of organisms by comparing anatomy rather than gene sequences is misleading. The study shows that we often need to overturn centuries of ...

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 ...

All species on Earth, both living and extinct, are related. We know this because of a biological tool called the tree of life. This "tree" takes the form of a diagram that maps the relationships ...

The story of primates is a tale of incredible variety and ancient roots, told through the lens of science, DNA, and time itself. These creatures, ranging from massive gorillas to tiny mouse lemurs, ...

Professor Emily Jane McTavish and colleagues at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have mapped the evolution of every known bird species. They created a complete evolutionary tree of bird species by ...

The three-dimensional shape of a protein can be used to resolve deep, ancient evolutionary relationships in the tree of life, according to a study in Nature Communications. It is the first time ...

University of Bath provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK. If you look different to your close relatives, you may have felt separate from your family. As a child, during particularly ...

Discover interesting facts about how evolution works, the different patterns that can emerge from evolution, how quickly organisms can evolve, and whether evolution is a random or ordered process When ...