Poposaurus comes from a group of extinct relatives of the crocodile known as Poposauroidea. Crocodiles and birds share an evolutionary heritage with dinosaurs and pterosaurs, despite there being ...

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, ...

Our species is the last living member of the human family tree. But just 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals walked the Earth, and hundreds of thousands of years before then, our ancestors overlapped with ...

Just as bird watchers may use binoculars to add to their species lists, scientists interested in bird evolution may use computational tools to clarify avian lineages. Indeed, such tools have enabled ...

Molecular evolutionary trees show that elephant shrews are more closely related to elephants, than they are to shrews. Credit: Danny Ye New research led by scientists at the Milner Centre for ...

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 ...

A groundbreaking study has traced the 66-million-year evolutionary history of primates and overturned conventional thought that our ancestors originally inhabited warm tropical forests. Using advanced ...

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 ...

When COVID-19 arrived, researchers tried to build evolutionary family trees – known as phylogenetic trees – of the virus. These help scientists understand when new virus strains appear and how they ...