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 oldest fossilised remains of complex animals appear suddenly in the fossil record, and as if from nowhere, in rocks that are 538 million years old.

To understand the origins of multicelled life, researchers are studying a motley assortment of simpler animal relatives. The commonalities they’re unearthing offer a trove of clues about our mutual ...

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, ...

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 ...

A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare. But as experts on the entangled ...

Life depends on genes being switched on and off at exactly the right time. Even the simplest living organisms do this, but usually over short distances across the DNA sequence, with the on/off switch ...