The "grotesque" baobab tree has long been known as the "tree of life" for its ability to create and maintain its own ecosystem in arid regions. Since the time of the ancient Egyptians, people have ...

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 ...

Loki’s godliness has always been more or less a technicality. He’s a god in the Marvel way, meaning he’s got a special status as an Asgardian and a host of mystical powers, but we haven’t seen him ...

Scientists use a novel application of chromosomal analysis to finally answer a question that has challenged biologists for over a century. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

All species on Earth, both living and extinct, are related. We know this because of a biological tool called the tree of life. This "tree" takes the form of a diagram that maps the relationships ...

Human-induced climate change and environmental degradation is causing entire genera to go extinct at rates 35 times higher than what’s been estimated to have occurred in the past one million years. A ...

The world’s largest butterfly tree of life is helping researchers determine where the winged insects originated when they first appeared on Earth about 100 million years ago. During the age of the ...

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 ...