For almost two decades, scientists have debated whether sponges or comb jellies are the first animal lineage. Now some are ...

Biologists have long drawn the animal family tree with a hazy base, unsure which creature first split from the common ancestor that gave rise to everything from jellyfish to humans. Now, a new genomic ...

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 ...

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 ...

"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 ...

To understand how organisms are related, researchers use molecular information to construct phylogenetic trees. Most of the time, scientists use thousands of protein-coding sequences to determine ...

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 ...

Coconut crabs are massive. Up to three feet in diameter, they scuttle across remote tropical islands in the western Indo-Pacific Ocean, cracking open coconuts like they’re made of butter, eating ...