The origin of turtles has always been a bit of a puzzle for scientists who study the evolution of animals. To this day, where ...

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 ...

The new findings suggest subterranean ecosystems may be far more dynamic than once believed.

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 ...

In evolutionary biology, all life on Earth is theoretically part of a single phylogenetic tree, indicating common ancestry.

A new study unveils the most comprehensive understanding of the evolutionary history of flowering plants to date. The research analyzed 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species ...

How do scientists study and classify life-forms? How can we understand the complex evolutionary connections between living organisms? Woese's breakthrough was momentous for at least three reasons.

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, ...

The order Primates consists of not only our closest relatives on earth, the seven great apes, but also over 450 species of monkeys, lemurs, lorises, and galagos. Primates are fantastically diverse, ...