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 ...

Tree genome evolution is a fascinating area in the study of biodiversity and ecosystem stability. Trees, with their distinctive life history traits, such as ...

During photosynthesis, trees convert the carbon dioxide to sugars and in doing so produce oxygen as a biproduct, which is vital for life on Earth. “Trees draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and ...

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 ...

Jonathan Keith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

That’s the literal translation of the term Dinosauria, coined by Sir Richard Owen in the 19th century to describe the colossal bones early paleontologists were unearthing. For a long time, the name ...

Land plants evolved 470 million years ago from algae and have since reshaped our world. Throughout their evolution, ferns have undergone a series of changes that have helped them survive on land. For ...

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, ...

The placoderms were a diverse group of ancient armoured fishes and it’s widely believed that they are ancestral to virtually all vertebrates alive today, including humans. Placoderms dominated aquatic ...

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 ...