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 ...

"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 ...

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, ...

Animals from completely different branches of the tree of life, such as insects, worms and vertebrates, independently evolved similar genetic solutions to survive on land, according to a new study ...

Evolution is often perceived as an incredibly slow, natural process driven by environmental pressures over millennia. That characterization certainly holds true, but humans have also repeatedly ...

One of the biggest quests in biology is understanding how every cell in an animal's body carries an identical genome yet ...

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 ...

Mixodectes pungens lived only a few million years after the dinosaurs went extinct. By Laura Baisas Published Mar 11, 2025 2:30 PM EDT Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, ...

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 ...

A new study argues that human culture — including religion, politics and war — influences how wildlife evolves in cities. In Los Angeles, factors such as policing, zoning, and local values and ...