New 3D analysis of a German skull clears up decades of confusion, placing this human firmly in the modern family tree.

Poposaurus comes from a group of extinct relatives of the crocodile known as Poposauroidea. Crocodiles and birds share an evolutionary heritage with dinosaurs and pterosaurs, despite there being ...

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, ...

Our species is the last living member of the human family tree. But just 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals walked the Earth, and hundreds of thousands of years before then, our ancestors overlapped with ...

An international team of scientists has created the largest and most detailed bird family tree ever, spanning 93 million years and representing 92% of bird families species, using cutting-edge ...

Just as bird watchers may use binoculars to add to their species lists, scientists interested in bird evolution may use computational tools to clarify avian lineages. Indeed, such tools have enabled ...

“Terrible Lizards”—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 ...

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 ...

When COVID-19 arrived, researchers tried to build evolutionary family trees – known as phylogenetic trees – of the virus. These help scientists understand when new virus strains appear and how they ...