Mock vipers not only look like tree-dwelling vipers but also act like them. Intriguingly, they have a fake ‘fang’ in the front of their mouth, which befools a predator into thinking that they possess ...

It's not every day that biologists announce an entirely new branch of life, and this one has been hiding under their noses ...

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, ...

Our results demonstrate the limitations of employing current metrics of branch support and species-tree estimation when assessing the confidence of ancient evolutionary radiations and emphasize the ...

New research headed by scientists at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) has demonstrated how the three-dimensional shape of a protein can be used to resolve deep, ancient evolutionary ...

Branch formation in trees has an inherent tendency toward exponential growth, but exponential growth in the number of branches cannot continue indefinitely. It has been suggested that trees balance ...

Using cutting-edge computational methods and supercomputing infrastructure, researchers have built the largest and most detailed bird family tree to date -- an intricate chart delineating 93 million ...

Editor's note: All opinions, columns and letters reflect the views of the individual writer and not necessarily those of the IDS or its staffers. We’ve all seen this poster in our middle school ...

The story of primates is a tale of incredible variety and ancient roots, told through the lens of science, DNA, and time itself. These creatures, ranging from massive gorillas to tiny mouse lemurs, ...

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 ...