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 ...

From the first spark of life to the dazzling diversity we see today, scientists are uncovering surprising twists in evolution’s story. New research is reshaping our understanding of the last universal ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called “last universal common ancestor” represents the most ancient organism that researchers can study.