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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

Using cutting-edge computational methods and supercomputing infrastructure, researchers have built the largest and most detailed bird family tree to date -- an intricate chart delineating 93 million ...

Professor Emily Jane McTavish and colleagues at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have mapped the evolution of every known bird species. They created a complete evolutionary tree of bird species by ...

STOCKTON, Calif. — A remarkable fossil discovery from Antarctica is rewriting the story of bird evolution. Scientists have unearthed an exceptionally well-preserved skull belonging to Vegavis iaai, a ...

“Few birds are as likely to start as many arguments among paleontologists as Vegavis,” Christopher Torres, a study co-author and paleontologist at the University of the Pacific, said in a statement.

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Fossil discoveries unlock chapters of our planet’s storied ...