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 ...

A single thermal performance curve applies across life, from bacteria to animals. Species differ in optimal temperatures, but not in the fundamental shape of their response to heat. Researchers at Tri ...

Exceptionally preserved fossils from the Ediacaran period challenge what scientists thought was possible in sandstone. In the fossil record, creatures without hard shells or skeletons, such as ...

The three-dimensional shape of a protein can be used to resolve deep, ancient evolutionary relationships in the tree of life, according to a study in Nature Communications. It is the first time ...

The origin of life on Earth becomes even more fascinating and complex as we peer into the mysterious world of viruses. Said ...

Ushikuvirus, an amoeba-infecting giant virus, joins the family of giant viruses that may have driven the evolution of complex ...

A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico ...