Properly deciphering the branching pathways of evolution could unlock the history of every component of natural biology.

All species on Earth, both living and extinct, are related. We know this because of a biological tool called the tree of life. This "tree" takes the form of a diagram that maps the relationships ...

If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life, we find there are many groups of mammals that have evolved testicles of all different sizes. In almost all these separate cases, ...

Most of us can imagine a tree of life; some can even sketch one out. Branches coming off branches coming off branches, each describing a turn in evolutionary history. Over here are the molluscs. Over ...

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 ...

The clearest picture yet of our “last universal common ancestor” suggests it was a relatively complex organism living 4.2 billion years ago, a time long considered too harsh for life to flourish. If ...

Defense systems found in all complex life on Earth came from "Asgard." The ancestor of plants, animals and fungi evolved around 2 billion years ago, likely from a group of complex microbes called ...

In a groundbreaking discovery, scientists at Trinity College Dublin have identified a "universal thermal performance curve" that governs how all living organisms respond to temperature. This finding ...

Professor Emily Jane McTavish and colleagues at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have mapped the evolution of every known bird species. They created a complete evolutionary tree of bird species by ...