Properly deciphering the branching pathways of evolution could unlock the history of every component of natural biology.

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

New research headed by scientists at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) has demonstrated how the three-dimensional shape of a protein can be used to resolve deep, ancient evolutionary ...

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, ...

Editor's note: All opinions, columns and letters reflect the views of the individual writer and not necessarily those of the IDS or its staffers. We’ve all seen this poster in our middle school ...

An updated evolutionary model shows that living systems evolve in a split-and-hit-the-gas dynamic, where new lineages appear in sudden bursts rather than during a long marathon of gradual changes.