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 ...

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 ...

Imagine zooming out on a giant family tree that includes every bird you have ever seen. Ostriches sprint across open plains, ...

A team of experts have found a tooth in Ethiopia which may rewrite our human family tree and forever alter our understanding of where we came from.

New research shows the “upside-down trees” originated in Madagascar and then caught a ride on ocean currents to reach mainland Africa and Australia. By Rachel Nuwer Baobabs are one of the most ...

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 ...

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, ...

During photosynthesis, trees convert the carbon dioxide to sugars and in doing so produce oxygen as a biproduct, which is vital for life on Earth. “Trees draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and ...

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 ...

Highly valued economically, ecologically and culturally, the white oak (Quercus alba) is a keystone forest species and is one of the most abundant trees across much of eastern North America. It also ...