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 ...

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 ...

The history of Earth is characterized by massive extinction events and the expansion of newly emerging groups of organisms. The timing of these extinctions is increasingly well understood, but it has ...

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 ...

An updated evolutionary model shows that living systems evolve in a split-and-hit-the-gas dynamic, where new lineages appear in sudden bursts rather than during a long marathon of gradual changes.

The branching structure of biological evolution confers statistical dependencies on phenotypic trait values in related organisms. For this reason, comparative macroevolutionary studies usually begin ...