Imagine zooming out on a giant family tree that includes every bird you have ever seen. Ostriches sprint across open plains, hummingbirds hover at flowers, penguins slice through cold seas, and eagles ...

My colleague and I have published a new study of cactus flowers which may help explain the conundrum. For more than a century ...

An international team of scientists has created the largest and most detailed bird family tree ever, spanning 93 million years and representing 92% of bird families species, using cutting-edge ...

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.

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 ...

Researchers have uncovered a universal pattern showing how temperature affects life on Earth. Across thousands of ...

Almost every plant we eat has a flower, and flowering plants populate every corner of the planet. But many questions remain about how and when this vast group emerged throughout the history of life on ...

A newly identified sponge order, Vilesida, produces sterols linked to the oldest-known animal biomarkers, supporting the idea ...