The Cornell Lab of Ornithology today announced the release of a new online tool for studying biodiversity and the ...

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 ...

Butterflies closer to the equator have been shown to evolve shared wing patterns faster than their relatives at higher latitudes. That gradient reframes tropical diversity as an active process, shaped ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Magic Kingdom has the regal Cinderella Castle. With Epcot, it's the gleaming and futuristic Spaceship Earth. These are Disney's theme park icons, which appear in photographs and advertising so ...

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 ...

Spider webs present an intriguing challenge to evolutionary biologists. These finely honed death traps come in many forms, from the trampoline-like construction of the sheet web spider, to the ...

The three-dimensional shape of a protein can be used to resolve deep, ancient evolutionary relationships in the tree of life, according to a study in Nature Communications. It is the first time ...