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 ...

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, ...

Artificial Christmas trees have been around since the 19th century, if not earlier. Trees made of dyed feathers originated in Germany and were introduced to the U.S. by the early 20th century. The mid ...

Molecular evolutionary trees show that elephant shrews are more closely related to elephants, than they are to shrews. Credit: Danny Ye New research led by scientists at the Milner Centre for ...

Just as bird watchers may use binoculars to add to their species lists, scientists interested in bird evolution may use computational tools to clarify avian lineages. Indeed, such tools have enabled ...

Genetic sharing among evolutionary neighbors all happens through hybrids: the offspring produced when individuals from two ...

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 ...

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, ...

A diverse group of lizards known as the social skinks is helping scientists answer questions about some of the fundamental workings of evolution. Skinks are a large group of lizards that typically ...

The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our ...