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, ...

An international team of scientists has created the largest and most detailed bird family tree ever, spanning 93 million years and representing 92% of bird families species, using cutting-edge ...

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 ...

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 ...

How far back in evolutionary history does kissing go? Through phylogenetic analysis, an international team of scientists found that kissing was likely present in the ancestor of all apes – which lived ...

Almost every plant we eat has a flower, and flowering plants populate every corner of the planet. But many questions remain about how and when this vast group emerged throughout the history of life on ...