That’s the literal translation of the term Dinosauria, coined by Sir Richard Owen in the 19th century to describe the colossal bones early paleontologists were unearthing. For a long time, the name ...

"This book was originally published as an issue of Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society B; Biological sciences (volume 363; number 1496) but has been materially changed and updated"--Title ...

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 ...

New research shows that the earliest sponges were soft bodied and lacked skeletons, explaining why their oldest fossils are ...

For over a century, scientists have wrestled with one of biology’s most fundamental mysteries: how the first animals evolved. These earliest creatures emerged more than 600 million years ago in ...

Sharks might not be a natural biological group, with most species potentially closer kin to rays than to an oddball group of sharks.

Life depends on genes being switched on and off at exactly the right time. Even the simplest living organisms do this, but usually over short distances across the DNA sequence, with the on/off switch ...

Researchers from the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN) have identified a new species of rhino that once roamed Canada's High Arctic 23 million years ago. The extinct rhinoceros, described in the journal ...

We humans have long viewed ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution. People label other species as "primitive" or "ancient" and use terms like "higher" and "lower" animals. This anthropocentric ...