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 ...

To think like a tree, one must begin by branching out: Try everything. Consider many possibilities at once. Be radically open ...

The tree of life is a massive framework that maps every living organism, showing how species evolved and branched over ...

Why do some species live for only weeks while others survive for centuries? Researchers at the Leibniz Institute on Aging - Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI) in Jena have developed AEGIS, a freely ...

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, ...

All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called “last universal common ancestor” represents the most ancient organism that researchers can study.

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 ...

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE AND NOTES -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- 1. Before Animals -- 2. Phylogenetics and the Base of the Animal Tree of Life -- 3. Ctenophora -- 4 ...