Tree thinking is a pedagogical approach that emphasises the interpretation and construction of phylogenetic trees to elucidate evolutionary relationships. In the context of evolutionary biology ...

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 ...

Evolutionary algorithms have emerged as a robust alternative to traditional greedy approaches for decision tree induction. By mimicking the natural selection process, these algorithms iterate over a ...

To understand how organisms are related, researchers use molecular information to construct phylogenetic trees. Most of the time, scientists use thousands of protein-coding sequences to determine ...

Imagine zooming out on a giant family tree that includes every bird you have ever seen. Ostriches sprint across open plains, ...

Some butterflies can smell others of the same species, allowing them to identify each other in areas where multiple species all look the same, new research finds. A large international team has ...

“A 62-million-year-old skeleton of this quality and completeness offers novel insights into mixodectids, including a much clearer picture of their evolutionary relationships,” study co-author and Yale ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. This rainforest tree solved one of evolution’s hardest ...