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 ...

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

Researchers have shed new light on the features that enable tree-dwelling mammals to move effectively through their ...

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 ...

We humans have long viewed ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution. People label other species as “primitive” or “ancient” and use terms like “higher” and “lower” animals. This anthropocentric ...

A new study explains how climbing down trees helped shape upright posture in early primates and changed the course of evolution.

New research headed by scientists at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) has demonstrated how the three-dimensional shape of a protein can be used to resolve deep, ancient evolutionary ...

In a study of chimpanzee and monkey anatomy, primate arms provide hints about how our ancestors got to the ground in one piece. By Miriam Fauzia Millions of years ago, a simian ancestor of humanity ...

Evolutionary algorithms have emerged as a robust alternative to traditional greedy approaches for decision tree induction. By mimicking the natural selection process, these algorithms iterate over a ...

Why do you have five fingers? Why not ten, or twenty, or one? Why do so many animals have five fingers? Five seems to be the perfect number for most hands. Oddly, the first vertebrates to come onto ...