This evolutionary tree shows the split between primate and rodent lineages about 90 million years ago, before the emergence of Alu elements in primates and B/ID elements in rodents. These short ...

Tree thinking is a pedagogical approach that emphasises the interpretation and construction of phylogenetic trees to elucidate evolutionary relationships. In the context of evolutionary biology ...

Play NOVA's Evolution Lab to explore the tree of life and become an expert in phylogenetics—the study of the evolutionary relationships among species. Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and ...

A research team, led by scientists at the University of York, mapped the family tree of the ferocious ambush-predators and their extinct relatives known as Pseudosuchia. They then compared this with ...

How far back in evolutionary history does kissing go? Through phylogenetic analysis, an international team of scientists ...

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 ...

A scientist I know has a tattoo on his arm of a sketch from Darwin’s notebooks. Spidery lines radiate outward from the center, branching and splitting again and again, ending with labels: A, B, C, and ...

Almost every plant we eat has a flower, and flowering plants populate every corner of the planet. But many questions remain about how and when this vast group emerged throughout the history of life on ...

The standard dinosaur family tree may soon be just a relic. After examining more than 400 anatomical traits, scientists have proposed a radical reshuffling of the major dinosaur groups. The rewrite, ...

Languages change and evolve in rapid bursts rather than in a steady pattern. New research investigates thousands of years of language evolution, and looks at the way in which languages split and ...