That’s the literal translation of the term Dinosauria, coined by Sir Richard Owen in the 19th century to describe the colossal bones early paleontologists were unearthing. For a long time, the name ...

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 ...

To understand the origins of multicelled life, researchers are studying a motley assortment of simpler animal relatives. The commonalities they’re unearthing offer a trove of clues about our mutual ...

A newly identified sponge order, Vilesida, produces sterols linked to the oldest-known animal biomarkers, supporting the idea ...

Copenhagen-based artist Jeppe Knudsen Ringsted merges science, design and cartography in Mappa Animalia, a visual project that reimagines the evolutionary relationships of animals as detailed map-like ...

"This book was originally published as an issue of Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society B; Biological sciences (volume 363; number 1496) but has been materially changed and updated"--Title ...

For over a century, scientists have wrestled with one of biology’s most fundamental mysteries: how the first animals evolved. These earliest creatures emerged more than 600 million years ago in ...

We humans have long viewed ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution. People label other species as "primitive" or "ancient" and use terms like "higher" and "lower" animals. This anthropocentric ...

Sharks might not be a natural biological group, with most species potentially closer kin to rays than to an oddball group of sharks.

To understand how organisms are related, researchers use molecular information to construct phylogenetic trees. Most of the time, scientists use thousands of protein-coding sequences to determine ...

Coconut crabs are massive. Up to three feet in diameter, they scuttle across remote tropical islands in the western Indo-Pacific Ocean, cracking open coconuts like they’re made of butter, eating ...