Imagine zooming out on a giant family tree that includes every bird you have ever seen. Ostriches sprint across open plains, ...

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 ...

Duplicated genes that appear in every branch of the tree of life can provide us with insight into the evolution that occurred ...

All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called "last universal common ancestor" represents the ...

Researchers describe a rare type of gene family, known as “universal paralogs”, that provides insight into evolutionary history predating the last universal common ancestor of all life. Detailed ...

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, ...

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 ...