Imagine zooming out on a giant family tree that includes every bird you have ever seen. Ostriches sprint across open plains, hummingbirds hover at flowers, penguins slice through cold seas, and eagles ...

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, ...

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 enormous meteor spelled doom for most dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But not all. In the aftermath of the extinction event, birds—technically dinosaurs themselves—flourished. Scientists have spent ...

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 ...

The woodpecker is a unique bird species that has gone through some mysteriously acquired adaptations since the extinction of the dinosaurs. Fossils tell us, without any explanations of course (because ...

Scientists have long wondered whether evolution would follow the same path if history had a chance for a “do-over.” New research suggests that it does, when it comes to the brain and its regulation of ...

Modern birds evolved earlier than previously assumed — much earlier than the dinosaurs’ mass extinction — an event that seems to have had a limited impact on avian evolution Artist’s depiction of the ...