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 ...

In the race of evolution, innovating is certainly necessary, but recycling existing genes is sometimes more efficient. Indeed, organisms that are very distant from each other can exchange a ...

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 ...

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 ...

All species on Earth, both living and extinct, are related. We know this because of a biological tool called the tree of life. This "tree" takes the form of a diagram that maps the relationships ...

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 ...