New research from the University of St Andrews has shed light on the evolution of an important yet thus far poorly understood ...

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 ...

NOTE: As of Jan. 9, 2026, the authors requested that the paper be retracted because of errors in the analysis. A reanalysis of the data will be posted at a later date. Biologists who study the ...

A human, an octopus, and a coral could hardly look more different—yet deep inside their cells, their chromosomes still carry recognizable pieces of a genome inherited from an animal ancestor that ...

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 ...

We humans have long viewed ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution. People label other species as "primitive" or "ancient" and use terms like "higher" and "lower" animals. This anthropocentric ...

Phylogenomic analysis harnesses genome-scale data sets to reconstruct the deep branches of the animal tree of life, resolving longstanding debates about the relationships among major lineages such as ...