A tree of life diagram for all flowering plant genera based on DNA analysis. (Image credit: Image by Zuntini et al., 2024, CC BY) All species on Earth, both living and extinct, are related.

This evolutionary tree shows Metazoa, the group that includes most animals, along with four unicellular cousins and the Holomycota, which includes fungi, as an outgroup for comparison. CREDIT ...

A first draft of the tree of life for all 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes has been released. Thousands of smaller trees have been published over the years for ...

Biology’s tree of life has morphed from the familiar classroom version emphasizing kingdoms into a complex depiction of supergroups, in which animals are aligned with a slew of single-celled ...

Evolutionary diagrams usually connect humans and monkeys with common primate ancestors, but now, scientists say there’s a missing link that deserves a spot on that family tree – our bacteria ...

All animals–from corgis to Greenland sharks, from dog ticks to toucans to you–descend from a common ancestor. The fossil record of animals, which runs back over 600 million years, can help us ...

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 ...

The rise of genome sequencing, at the turn of the twenty-first century, seemed to bring Darwin’s dream within reach. “It is now realistic to conceive of reconstructing the entire Tree of Life ...

Half a billion years ago, an unusual-looking animal crawled over the sea floor, using tentacles to pick up food particles along the way. Known as Rotadiscus grandis, this animal lived during the ...

That is 273 million years earlier than the glowing ostracod crustaceans that previously held the title of earliest evolution of bioluminescence in animals. DeLeo and Quattrini said that the octocorals ...

Snakes have an evolutionary clock that ticks a lot faster than many other groups of animals, allowing them to diversify and evolve at super quick speeds, researchers have discovered.