A brilliant yellow coral discovered off Costa Rica proved so unusual that scientists had to create an entirely new family to classify it. The meter-tall colonies rise from seafloors covered in brittle ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Poposaurus comes from a group of extinct relatives of the crocodile known as Poposauroidea. Crocodiles are some of the most fierce ...

Birds calling back and forth in the morning make up one of the defining sounds of tropical forests. We're likely to assume ...

This month, George Tiley began his NC State appointment as an assistant professor of plant and microbial biology. Right before his Aug. 1 start date, Tiley and colleagues published a Perspectives ...

Using one of the largest DNA data sets for a group of birds and employing next-generation sequencing methods, Smithsonian scientists and collaborators have determined the evolutionary family tree for ...

When COVID-19 arrived, researchers tried to build evolutionary family trees – known as phylogenetic trees – of the virus. These help scientists understand when new virus strains appear and how they ...

“Terrible Lizards”—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 ...

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 ...

Almost every plant we eat has a flower, and flowering plants populate every corner of the planet. But many questions remain about how and when this vast group emerged throughout the history of life on ...