Centromeres play virtually the same central role across the entire tree of life: They ensure the faithful segregation of ...

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 ...

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 ...

Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived ...

Explore an interactive avian tree of life that reveals how 11,000 bird species are connected through millions of years of ...

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of all species, living and extinct, is their extraordinary interconnectivity. Each species on Earth can trace its roots back to the same cluster of ancestral ...

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 ...

Duplicated genes that appear in every branch of the tree of life can provide us with insight into the evolution that occurred between the first lifeform and the last from which we all descend, ...

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 ...

The story of primates is a tale of incredible variety and ancient roots, told through the lens of science, DNA, and time itself. These creatures, ranging from massive gorillas to tiny mouse lemurs, ...