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 ...

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 ...

“The more species of Homo there were, the higher the rate of speciation. So when those niches got filled, something drove even more species to emerge. This is almost unparalleled in evolutionary ...

Researchers report February 15 in the journal Cell that ancient viruses may be to thank for myelin—and, by extension, our large, complex brains. The team found that a retrovirus-derived genetic ...

Scientists have investigated lamprey embryos using cutting-edge microscopic techniques to reveal interesting insights about vertebrate head evolution, clarifying an unresolved mystery in basic science ...