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, ...

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 ...

Sitting in my campsite at Goblin Valley State Park, I saw an antelope ground squirrel standing erect on its back feet, which ...

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 ...

Fossils of archaic humans found in a cave in Casablanca are helping to fill a gap in the history of humanity's evolutionary ...

Spider webs present an intriguing challenge to evolutionary biologists. These finely honed death traps come in many forms, from the trampoline-like construction of the sheet web spider, to the ...

Just as bird watchers may use binoculars to add to their species lists, scientists interested in bird evolution may use computational tools to clarify avian lineages. Indeed, such tools have enabled ...

If you look different to your close relatives, you may have felt separate from your family. As a child, during particularly stormy fallouts you might have even hoped it was a sign that you were ...

This month, George Tiley began his NC State appointment as an assistant professor of plant and microbial biology. Right before his Aug. 1 start date, Tiley and colleagues published a Perspectives ...

Bipedal locomotion - walking upright on two legs - is a fundamental trait underpinning humankind's success. Scientists now have identified two innovations that occurred long ago in the human ...