Why do some species live for only weeks while others survive for centuries? Researchers at the Leibniz Institute on Aging - Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI) in Jena have developed AEGIS, a freely ...

The tree of life is a massive framework that maps every living organism, showing how species evolved and branched over ...

Evolution is perhaps the most extraordinary story ever told—a tale spanning billions of years that connects every living thing on Earth through an intricate web of shared ancestry. From the tiniest ...

In a world where evolutionary biology often gets boiled down to simplistic hierarchies of "primitive" and "advanced" species, a new book by University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) biologist ...

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.

Scientists have discovered which animal was the first to branch off from our collective common ancestor. For years, debate had raged over whether the first to diverge was the sea sponge or the comb ...

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE AND NOTES -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- 1. Before Animals -- 2. Phylogenetics and the Base of the Animal Tree of Life -- 3. Ctenophora -- 4 ...

A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico ...

To think like a tree, one must begin by branching out: Try everything. Consider many possibilities at once. Be radically open ...

When we think of the fish that inhabit the deep blue sea today, it’s easy to forget that they haven’t always been there. The ocean was once a much quieter place, populated mainly by smaller creatures, ...