Animals from completely different branches of the tree of life, such as insects, worms and vertebrates, independently evolved ...

Genomes are key to unlocking life's evolutionary history. The presence and absence of certain genetic sequences and mutations ...

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 ...

Biological Sciences Professor and Chair Eric Hayden participated on an international research team that recently published ...

Human-induced climate change and environmental degradation is causing entire genera to go extinct at rates 35 times higher than what’s been estimated to have occurred in the past one million years. A ...

The "grotesque" baobab tree has long been known as the "tree of life" for its ability to create and maintain its own ecosystem in arid regions. Since the time of the ancient Egyptians, people have ...

In a world where evolutionary biology often gets boiled down to simplistic hierarchies of "primitive" and "advanced" species, a new book by University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) biologist ...

How animals of the Cambrian period experienced the Cambrian Explosion, which shaped life today and could help researchers ...

Discover interesting facts about how evolution works, the different patterns that can emerge from evolution, how quickly organisms can evolve, and whether evolution is a random or ordered process When ...

Almost every plant we eat has a flower, and flowering plants populate every corner of the planet. But many questions remain about how and when this vast group emerged throughout the history of life on ...