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 ...

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 ...

The woodpecker is a unique bird species that has gone through some mysteriously acquired adaptations since the extinction of the dinosaurs. Fossils tell us, without any explanations of course (because ...

A pigeon pecking at crumbs in a city square rarely attracts much attention. It is easy to see it as an ordinary bird, part of ...

Shortly after an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, life for non-avian dinosaurs ended, but the evolutionary story for the early ancestors of birds began. The fossil record tells us ...

The study found that bird species who nest in tree cavities have independently evolved heightened aggression across lineages, particularly in females. Scientists have long wondered whether evolution ...

Professor Emily Jane McTavish and colleagues at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have mapped the evolution of every known bird species. They created a complete evolutionary tree of bird species by ...

Fri, May 2, 2025 at 12:00 PM UTC Those many millions of years have given birds time to evolve into some 11,000 species, and keeping track of all those species—not to mention their evolutionary history ...

Scientists have long wondered whether evolution would follow the same path if history had a chance for a “do-over.” New research suggests that it does, when it comes to the brain and its regulation of ...