This rainforest tree solved one of evolution’s hardest problems. Here’s how it evolved to use tension and geometry to fire ...

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 ...

For over a century, scientists have wrestled with one of biology’s most fundamental mysteries: how the first animals evolved. These earliest creatures emerged more than 600 million years ago in ...

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 ...

A groundbreaking study has traced the 66-million-year evolutionary history of primates and overturned conventional thought that our ancestors originally inhabited warm tropical forests. Using advanced ...

The oldest fossilised remains of complex animals appear suddenly in the fossil record, and as if from nowhere, in rocks that ...

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 ...