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 ...

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 ...

Scientists use a novel application of chromosomal analysis to finally answer a question that has challenged biologists for over a century. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

The three-dimensional shape of a protein can be used to resolve deep, ancient evolutionary relationships in the tree of life, according to a study in Nature Communications. It is the first time ...

A new study unveils the most comprehensive understanding of the evolutionary history of flowering plants to date. The research analyzed 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species ...

The order Primates consists of not only our closest relatives on earth, the seven great apes, but also over 450 species of monkeys, lemurs, lorises, and galagos. Primates are fantastically diverse, ...