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 ...

"This book was originally published as an issue of Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society B; Biological sciences (volume 363; number 1496) but has been materially changed and updated"--Title ...

The oldest fossilised remains of complex animals appear suddenly in the fossil record, and as if from nowhere, in rocks that ...

For over a century, scientists have wrestled with one of biology’s most fundamental mysteries: how the first animals evolved. These earliest creatures emerged more than 600 million years ago in ...

Evolution is often perceived as an incredibly slow, natural process driven by environmental pressures over millennia. That characterization certainly holds true, but humans have also repeatedly ...

One of the biggest quests in biology is understanding how every cell in an animal's body carries an identical genome yet still gives rise to a kaleidoscope of different cell types and tissues. A ...

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 ...

From frogs and sponges to jellyfish and tardigrades, scientists reveal how some animals digest food without defecating, ...