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 ...

Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived ...

Scientists Discover a New Form of Life Standing 26 Feet Tall ...

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 ...

"By following universal paralogs," says Kaçar, "we can connect the earliest steps of life on Earth to the tools of modern ...

All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called "last universal common ancestor" represents the ...

Researchers describe a rare type of gene family, known as “universal paralogs”, that provides insight into evolutionary history predating the last universal common ancestor of all life. Detailed ...

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 ...

Oxygen is everywhere on Earth today. But that hasn’t always been the case. Scientists think oxygen only became a lasting part ...