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 ...

Researchers report that ancient viruses may be to thank for myelin -- and, by extension, our large, complex brains. The team found that a retrovirus-derived genetic element or 'retrotransposon' is ...

Competition between species played a major role in the rise and fall of hominins -- and produced a 'bizarre' evolutionary pattern for the Homo lineage -- according to a new study that revises the ...

A research team led by Profs. ZHU Min, LU Jing, and ZHU You'an from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences published two back-to-back ...

The water-to-land transition stands as one of the most significant events in vertebrate evolution, giving rise to the two major groups of living land vertebrates-amniotes and lissamphibians-which ...

Deep in human evolutionary history, before anything recognizable as a vertebrate existed, one of our oldest relatives had a ...

Even Charles Darwin was puzzled by the evolution of the vertebrate eye. New research suggests that it traces back to a cyclopean invertebrate with a single eye atop the head. By Carl Zimmer Look at ...