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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Sitting in my campsite at Goblin Valley State Park, I saw an antelope ground squirrel standing erect on its back feet, which ...

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 ...

If you look different to your close relatives, you may have felt separate from your family. As a child, during particularly stormy fallouts you might have even hoped it was a sign that you were ...

Competition between species played a major role in the rise and fall of hominins -- and produced a 'bizarre' evolutionary pattern for the Homo lineage -- according to a new study that revises the ...

As our species (Homo sapiens) evolved and spread across the globe, they were contemporary with several other hominins. These include the best known of our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, but ...

The evolutionary history of the mock viper, a mildly venomous, widely distributed Asian snake that mimics highly venomous vipers for self-defense, has been solved. The mock viper represents a ...

This month, George Tiley began his NC State appointment as an assistant professor of plant and microbial biology. Right before his Aug. 1 start date, Tiley and colleagues published a Perspectives ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Bipedal locomotion - walking upright on two legs - is a fundamental trait underpinning humankind's success. Scientists now have identified two innovations that occurred long ago ...