Poposaurus comes from a group of extinct relatives of the crocodile known as Poposauroidea. Crocodiles and birds share an evolutionary heritage with dinosaurs and pterosaurs, despite there being ...

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 ...

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, ...

Just as bird watchers may use binoculars to add to their species lists, scientists interested in bird evolution may use computational tools to clarify avian lineages. Indeed, such tools have enabled ...

A recent study reveals we have a long-lost relative which hung out with our more famous apelike ancestors about three million years ago. It turns out the human family tree is more complicated than we ...

To understand the origins of multicelled life, researchers are studying a motley assortment of simpler animal relatives. The commonalities they’re unearthing offer a trove of clues about our mutual ...

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 ...