"This book was originally published as an issue of Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society B; Biological sciences (volume 363; number 1496) but has been materially changed and updated"--Title ...

To understand how organisms are related, researchers use molecular information to construct phylogenetic trees. Most of the time, scientists use thousands of protein-coding sequences to determine ...

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 ...

“Terrible Lizards”—That’s the literal translation of the term Dinosauria, coined by Sir Richard Owen in the 19th century to describe the colossal bones early paleontologists were unearthing. For a ...

The transition from water to land is a question that still intrigues scientists. Those ancient organisms would have needed to adapt to several new challenges to life out of water. So, how did they do ...

One of the biggest quests in biology is understanding how every cell in an animal’s body carries an identical genome yet still gives rise to a kaleidoscope of different cell types and tissues. A ...

Researchers from the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN) have identified a new species of rhino that once roamed Canada's High Arctic 23 million years ago. The extinct rhinoceros, described in the journal ...

People typically think about evolution as a linear process where, within a species, the classic adage of “survival of the fittest” is constantly at play. New DNA mutations arise and get passed from ...