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 ...

We humans have long viewed ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution. People label other species as “primitive” or “ancient” and ...

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology today announced the release of a new online tool for studying biodiversity and the evolutionary relationships among birds: the illustrated Birds of the World Phylogeny ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Biologists have long drawn the animal family tree with a hazy base, unsure which creature first split from the common ancestor that gave rise to everything from jellyfish to humans. Now, a new genomic ...

The Magic Kingdom has the regal Cinderella Castle. With Epcot, it's the gleaming and futuristic Spaceship Earth. These are Disney's theme park icons, which appear in photographs and advertising so ...