Why do you have five fingers? Why not ten, or twenty, or one? Why do so many animals have five fingers? Five seems to be the perfect number for most hands. Oddly, the first vertebrates to come onto ...

Properly deciphering the branching pathways of evolution could unlock the history of every component of natural biology.

All species on Earth, both living and extinct, are related. We know this because of a biological tool called the tree of life. This "tree" takes the form of a diagram that maps the relationships ...

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 ...

Most of us can imagine a tree of life; some can even sketch one out. Branches coming off branches coming off branches, each describing a turn in evolutionary history. Over here are the molluscs. Over ...